Artists
Artists
Cristina Iglesias
April 26, 2014- ongoing
 
 
Toledo stands above the fast flowing waters of the River Tagus. Its waters were drawn up by the first communities into their fountains, cisterns and baths, and so the settlement flourished.

In making Tres Aguas – A Project for Toledo, her most ambitious work to date, Cristina Iglesias drew from the cultural history of the city, its mingling and layering of Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities who lived alongside each other for centuries in the period known as "La Convivencia" or The Co-existence. The three sculptural works that make up the project bring water to the fore; it courses through channels and travels back into the ground after animating the surfaces of the works so they come to resemble the overgrown bed of some ancient river. Visitors are taken on a journey through the city as they visit each work, from a mudéjar water tower to the city's main public space and then onto a hidden location within a convent, a place not normally open for visitors.
 
Conceived as a journey into the heart of the city, Iglesias' project aligns the hard materials of architecture and the fluidity of water to deliver a sequence of large-scale sculptural works that bring the river back into the body of this historic city. 
 
Cristina Iglesias: Tres Aguas
Permanent Collection

Cristina Iglesias has designed a site-specific piece for the Botín Centre and the Pereda Gardens, consisting of four pools and a pond, entitled Desde lo subterráneo (From the Underground).

The sculptural intervention features five structures in grey stone enclosing overlapping iron pieces forming hollow spaces. They evoke the subterranean, the things that exist beneath the surface. Phreatic zones, underground areas saturated with water, pockets of water filled with foliage and molluscs, life speaking of the primordial ocean that gave origin to all forms of life on Earth.

 
 
Cristina Iglesias at Centro Botín
Permanent Collection

Cristina Iglesias's permanent hanging sculpture is now on view at the Norman Foster Foundation.

The sculpture is constructed by several suspended screens that form a shadowed space between the old building and the new pavilion created by Sir Norman Foster. The screens are thread in carbon fiber following an excerpt of the novel “Paradise Fountains” by science fiction author, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, which talks about the ionosphere.

Cristina Iglesias at the Norman Foster Foundation