Art, creation and social criticism
Irantzu Lekue
Basque multidisciplinary artist
committed to social awareness
based in Vitoria- Gasteiz (Basque Country).
Multidisciplinary artist and cultural activist. Irantzu Lekue studied at the faculty of Fine Arts of the University of the Basque country, Granada, Tenerife, Perugia (Italy), Madrid and Essex universities.
Her work is renowned for its strong social awareness content. Through different techniques and styles, she had dealt with issues like past events, racism, social injustices, climate change, identity crisis or women’s rights, always culminating in a reflection of our existence. In her creative production she combines abstract and figurative paint with photography, the conceptual sculpture, artistic installations, video art and muralism.
Apart from her participation in numerous exhibitions and interventions on a national and international level, her awards and newspaper reviews in different artistic journals must be highlighted. And so, she is considered to be a multidisciplinary artist.
Her installations, characterised by the reiteration of daily objects in an aim to redefine them, and which are an invitation to interact and critical reflection. She closed the Waves of energy programme in the Cultural capital San Sebastian 2016 with her installation “Aztarnak”, made up of 10,000 glass bottles forming a giant fingerprint. Each bottle contained a message on culture and art, written by anyone who wanted to participate. She has painted numerous murals of great dimensions in public spaces.
She has painted murals of great dimensions and this has taken her to countries like Argentina, Italy, Switzerland, England, Greece and France. The latest great piece by this contemporary artist is the one developed in Barcelona (Catalonia). It was a participative mural for social transformation Temps de Dones, in La CIBA, an emblematic building, more than 6,000 square metres which was to become a reference point in Europe as it was endowed with state of the art features to develop gender policies, innovation and feminist economy. The title of the mural makes a reference to the song “les temps de cerises” and the Paris Commune, and represents different generations of women who free one another, the one that stands out the most is a little girl who symbolises the future and the new generation.
Another piece worth highlighting is one carried out in Usurbil (Gipuzkoa) “Loreen abstrakzioa” which she shares with the birds of the prestigious basque artist Jose Luis Zumeta with some of the colours and shapes which the artist used for the creation of the sculpture installation. The artist chose to reinterpret the interior of the flowers. “Zumeta’s birds endow the space in a context and I chose to get to the heart of the earth through the flowers. Irantzu Lekue was joined by other great artists during the creation in the town of Usurbil, like Jose Luis Zumeta, Remigio Mendiburu, Alejandro Tapia, Iñaki Olazabal or Judas Arrieta. She shared her mural in Errekaleor with the renowned street art Italian artist “Blu”
She was invited to participate in the Bienal de Arte de Neuquén, Argentina and created another great piece in the “Pasaje al arte” in the Patagonian city.