08.06.2018

Hamish Fulton. When walking becomes an artistic practice

Bombas Gens Centre d’Art has presented this morning Walking on the Iberian Peninsula; the individual exhibition of the British artist Hamish Fulton. The exhibition opens today after a conversation with the artist and can be visited until next November 4.

Curated by Nuria Enguita and organised in collaboration with Colección INELCOM Arte Contemporáneo (Madrid), and espaivisor. The exhibition gathers a selection of works made during several walks of the artist. Fulton has made walking his artistic practice, standing as an example of the possibilities of art as space for plastic and conceptual experimentation.

‘The artist decided with only 27 years old that walk would be the factory of his art, his only reason for being. Since then, he has dedicated himself to walk, always starting from an ecological premise. One of the most remarkable facts of his work is that he does not work with the landscape, he focuses on leaving no traces behind’, explained Nuria Enguita, director of Bombas Gens Centre d’Art.

The record of these walks (through different mediums such as photographs, drawings, engravings, sculptures, texts or murals) is what actually is displayed in Walking on the Iberian Peninsula. An exhibition whose main point is the walk through the Benicadell that the artist made in 2016. He carried out the walk in response to the proposal put forward by Vicente Todolí, advisor to Per Amor a l’Art and Inelcom collections.

‘The owners of the two collections share a sentimental bond with the Benicadell, since one is from Atzeneta d’Albaida and the other is from La Pobla del Duc. I had previously worked with Fulton and I thought that the strength of this mythical mountain of the Valencian Community hinterland could fit very well both in the artist work and the two collections’, said Todolí.

This work is part of one of the sponsorship projects developed by the Fundació Per Amor a l’Art, and has now resulted in this exhibition that, in the words of the artist himself, ‘is a comment on our way of life; roads are made for cars, but we can walk along them. Keep walking becomes a critique to the established, what technology set us. We are influenced by some rules, and I do not propose an alternative but a different way of relating to the earth itself’.