Born in Vienna but residing in Spain since 1968, Eva Lootz occupies a unique place within her generation. In 1994 she received the Spanish National Visual Arts Prize in recognition of her important contribution to the Spanish artistic panorama, although her personality and the originality of her work by far exceed this geographical boundary. In her city of origin she studied philosophy and painting and she graduated in film studies. She arrived in Spain when it was still under a dictatorship but was starting to see the beginning of political contestation, especially in the field of culture. This was the critical context that Lootz, together with her companion, the also artist from Austria, Adolfo Schlosser, became a part of. If initially she was interested in the American abstract painting of the colour field painters —characterised by uniform surfaces and large fields of colour—and especially by Morris Louis, she soon abandoned colour to focus not only on the qualities of the fluidity of painting, but also on the possibilities that the use of extra-pictorial resources offered her. She thus began a personal journey of experimentation that placed her in the orbit of Joseph Beuys and, above all, of Eva Hesse. It could be said that her work combines echoes from Arte Povera, from minimal art and from land art, in practices that are the precursors of postminimalism.

This exhibition is not put forward as an anthology—it would be impossible to enclose in a single exhibition over forty years of non-stop work. Instead, it is more of an approach to a series of meaningful pieces that began to see the light in the nineteen-seventies and that have lasted to this day. We therefore find an extensive compilation of works from that early stage, although for greater precision, it would be more convenient to refer to them as ‘objects.’ They contain a predominant attitude of search and experimentation through the use of the most diverse materials. One block is made up of a series of unusual pictorial surfaces where colour has been eliminated to explore the behaviour of pigments in the supports: tar, alkyl, paraffin, wax seal, carbon, fibreglass, wool, flanelette, canvas, tarlatan, esparto, felt, etc. The leap to three-dimensionality happens naturally adding lead or tin foil to the previous materials, as well as seeds, brown paper, or slate, to generate extremely simple shapes that suggest the notion of continuity or seriality (parallelepipeds, grilles) but she also uses shapes reminiscent of the body and perception (hands, ears, tongues, handles, shoes, prints, etc.). Fleeing from any type of virtuosity, Lootz explores structures and elementary shapes to which she refers to from an early stage as ‘objects lacking sculptoric interest’ or ‘objects bordering with non-objects,’ limiting with the ‘non-shape.’ The manipulation process and the properties of the materials become generators of the artistic structure. The piece Cut Through the Fog not only presides over this exhibition, but also over a way of understanding reality, the world, in an allusion to a cut beyond that which is visible, to a position before life. There are two pieces that we could interpret faithfully embody this idea: on the one hand the video Blind Spot, which in this version is presented in a room filled with fog, thus underlining the blind spot theme. On the other hand, the screening of a large throat that appears in the video Gran torbellino (Great whirlwind, 2016) suggests the idea of being dragged, absorbed, of even disappearing, and indicates the impossibility of a complete statement. Perhaps it is suggesting the questioning of our models of thinking to give rise to a restoring emptiness. Lootz delves into ancient cultures. In her work there emerge shapes prior to the appearance of writing—ancient signs like the 8 symbol of infinity, placed on the floor, which appears both in Circuito roto (Broken Circuit) as in Bucle abierto (Open Loop) (both from 1988)—as if she were listening to the beating of the earth, to its music and, above all, to the sound that human presence makes on it.