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Elena Bajo is an artist living and working in Berlin, New York, Madrid and LA. She received a Masters Degree in Architecture from ESARQ, School of Architecture of the Catalunya International University in Barcelona in 2002 and a Masters Degree in Fine Arts in 2005 from Central Saint Martins School of Art in London, and she has studied with Gabriel Orozco. Her piece “Silent” received the Madrid Abierto Public Sculpture Art Award in 2004. She has exhibited in numerous international venues, Istanbul Biennial, PS 122, Exit Art, LMCC, Chelsea Gallery. She is a regular contributor to Art Seen Journal. She has been recipient of the Marcelino Botin Scholarship, Spain, 2005 and the Domus Academie Scholarship, with Olafur Elliasson and Yona Friedman, 2005 Venice Biennial. She was granted Scholarship at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, in Maine, USA, 2006. Recent shows include Royal Botanical Garden, Madrid, A-Z West, Andrea Zittel, Joshua Tree, Air Garten Berlin and Galway City Museum, Tulca 2007, Ireland, the Museum of the city of Murcia, Explum award 08 nominated by Luca Cerizza. Future Exhibitions include Goldrausch at the Kunstraum Bethanien. Berlin. She has been selected to participate in the ISCP Program in New York .

Elena Bajo is part of a new generation of social sculptors who are refocusing their attention on time-based immaterial and performative sculpture, first investigated by Barry Le Va, Joseph Beuys, and Robert Morris. Forty years have passed since these experiments and procedures and much has happened since then. Those works can no longer be appreciated in their pure states and their interpretation and reproduction by younger artists reflects the complex nature of those works as they become woven together with other practices and states of being which have emerged since then. Elena's work merges many of these earlier strategies, such as Situationism, Post- Minimalism and Scatter Art with Relational Aesthetics, Post-conceptualism and Post-production to make works that are folded, multiplicitous and rhizomatic.


Melissa Lo on Elena Bajo for Ten By Ten curatorial LAXART May 2007

Leftover magazine clippings, broken slabs of concrete, aluminum foil and excess tile samples, perhaps discarded from a construction site or an architect's studio, are recovered by Elena Bajo's brand of bricolage. Her practice emphasizes how deconstructed and recontextualized objects form subtle relationships. The work begs the questions; how does one reconstitute fragments of the city and how does one reconcile this fractured urban fabric within the context of the white cube?

Artist's Statement

My practice is informed by architecture and researches social and political ideas that deal with objects, structures and spatial situations generated by re-contextualizing cultural artifacts within the context of a progressive installation which may evolve into sculpture, painting, performance, video or text.
I am interested in the cultural unconscious and the theatre in which the social imagined is played. The urban context generates the materials I work with. I explore the city by walking, using an approach followed in the past by the Situationist Movement. I am interested in areas of formal discontinuity, such as construction and demolition sites or areas where a diversity of leftover material accumulates. I am interested in exploring these gaps and interruptions. I mix found debris and formal architectural elements into outdoor and indoors installations, re-enacting the memory of the city as a fragmented landscape of dislocated images and unfinished structures. These discontinuities, now unfolded into a series of spatial arrangements may reveal alternative social systems. These spatial constructions, become prototypes of what I call "architectures of disorder", reflecting into the global conditions of our world today and introducing a new formal logic of space and time. As Gordon Matta-Clark would say: 'How one maneuvers in the systems, determines what size and kind of space we work and live in'.

I\'m Looking for a Title

2007
Sculpture and Architectural installation
Variable

I'm Looking for a Title

2007
Sculpture and Painting using found paint
Variable

I'm Looking for a Title

2007
Sculpture and Painting using found paint
Variable

I'm Looking for a Title

2007
Acrylic on found painting, photos, maski
1m x 2m

I'm Looking for a Title

2007
Photo and sculpture
Variable

I'm Looking for a Title

2007
Sculpture
Variable

I'm Looking for a Title

2007
Sculpture
40cmx15cm

I'm Looking for a Title

2007
Architectural construction using found m
Variable

Myths

2007
Installation
Variable

Myths

2007
Acrylic and photo collage on found painting
Variable

Myths

2007
Acrylic and photo collage on found painting
Variable

Will I dream?

2007
Sculpture and painting
Variable

Will I Dream...?

2007
Installation
Variable

Will I Dream...?

2007
Sculpture and painting
Variable

Will I Dream...?

2007
Sculpture and painting
Variable

Will I Dream...?

2007
Acrylic and photo collage on found painting