Event Item: 00066

Andy Goldsworthy - En las entrañas del árbol

Exhibition: 3rd Oct 2007 to 21st Jan 2008

Source: http://www.museoreinasofia.es

En las entrañas del árbol is Goldsworthy's most ambitious wood dome project to date, constructed inside the Palacio de Cristal, in the heart of Madrid's Parque del Retiro.

Goldsworthy built his first large wood dome in 2005. Previously he had constructed smaller wood domes around large boulders or the base of trees, or simply as freestanding structures to enclose space. Typically Goldsworthy would build these structures mostly from the inside - the structure often becoming a cramped, tight fit as he negotiated its construction around a boulder for instance. These experiential conditions lie behind Goldsworthy's desire to increase the scale of the domes to accommodate not one but several human occupants. That desire also derives from an early performance work that Goldsworthy undertook in 1983, for which he climbed into a small hole in the base of a Sycamore tree. The experience of 'being in the stomach of the tree' registered profoundly with him, and is one that he has sought to stage for the visitor. En las entrañas del árbol is Goldsworthy's most ambitious wood dome project to date, and it develops the two dome spaces that he has built in London and Yorkshire insofar as it comprises three joined structures. Indeed, the shape of the wood structures follows the architecture of the Palacio de Cristal, which itself becomes a glass epidermis, a layer in the growth principle that radiates out from the centre.

Andy Goldsworthy is British sculptor internationally known for his exclusive use of natural materials, such as wood, stone, leaves, clay, mud, snow and ice. These he typically uses at or near to the place where he finds them, subjecting them to forms and processes that reveal and heighten properties particular to them, their immediate context or their source. Perhaps best known for his sculptures and projects that are ephemeral, and even momentary in their existence, Goldsworthy has also produced a significant body of large permanent sited works, and has developed a broad range of temporary gallery-based installations, which frequently engage the 'nature' or material origins of buildings. En las entrañas del árbol has been built using Scots Pine from the forests in the mountains to the north of Madrid which supplies timber for a range of commercial products. Already harvested, Goldsworthy has 'borrowed' and temporarily diverted the wood stock from its commercial route. As Goldsworthy has suggested, 'what is interesting for me is when you present a material in its raw state… there is a shock and a sense of discomfort…What you use in the city is nature too, and I hope that when I make a work in a building I make that association.

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía - Palacio de Cristal, Parque del Retiro.