Abstract:
Ignacio Uriarte (*1972 in Krefeld, lives in Valencia) studied business administration before he became an artist and he also worked in this field. Apart from a brief period of audiovisual art studies in Guadalajara, Mexico (1999-2001), he has dealt with art mainly in the phases that Joseph Beuys did not know: “I know no weekend.” At a certain moment, however, Uriarte had become bored enough at the desks where he sat as a business administrator. And he got to thinking, comparable to Jennie, the famous dog in Maurice Sendak’s book Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life, that there must be indeed more to life than, for example, the certainty as an employee and mundane possessions, and that he therefore wanted to take a different path: that of art. Accordingly, in 2003 he changed course and became a professional artist, whose work deals with the world of offices and the materials used and processed in them in every conceivable medium. These works discuss issues of time, structure, order, and monotony as well as the creative potential in seemingly inefficient processes, such as scribbling on a notepad during a conversation. Through his conceptual approach as well as the use of materials from everyday office life, the artist builds a Dada-like bridge between the world of work and the world of art.

Uriarte has been able to show his work in a wide variety of institutional solo and group exhibitions worldwide; Institutional collections that have works by him include –