Ignasi Aballí's Spanish Pavilion at 59th Venice Biennale highlights decades of material exploration

Ignasi Aballí represents Spain at the 59th Venice Biennale, showcasing a practice centered on everyday minutiae. His retrospective at Madrid's Reina Sofía museum in 2015 featured early works like Hojas (Leaves) (1978), which used dried leaves to explore painting without paint. Aballí employs diverse materials including dust, sunlight, shredded banknotes, and newspaper clippings across photography, video, installation, and language-based works. His Listados series (1998-2015) organizes El País headlines into categories like death tolls and currencies, creating photographic images from text. Works like Luz (Light) from the 1990s capture sunlight discoloration in his Barcelona studio, while Desapariciones (2002) references Georges Perec's lipogrammatic novel through fictional film posters. Independent curator Dan Cameron notes Aballí's focus on reduction and mortality, including Listados in the 13th Cuenca Biennial in Ecuador. Reina Sofía deputy director João Fernandes identifies Aballí's generation as expanding conceptual art's image-making possibilities. The artist cites influences ranging from On Kawara and Marcel Duchamp to filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and writers Samuel Beckett. His nearly 30-year studio in Barcelona's Raval neighborhood, a former piano factory, accumulates dust and light central to his process. This profile originally appeared in ArtReview's September 2016 issue.