In the usual way of things art objects tend to exist in either two or three dimensions: drawings and paintings flat on a wall, or sculptures in the round. Johanna Unzueta’s work doesn’t play by these rules, her work slips between two and three dimensions and nods to a fourth - inviting another way of seeing that takes the viewer to a transcendental territory beyond the object itself. Her work is of this world, environmentally orientated and often originating as a found object and tinted with pigments from plants or vegetables – rooted in the real in other words – yet it has a kind of reflective interiority that invites us to travel to a place governed by dreams as much as logic. It is a journey guided by the physicality and precision of Unzueta’s craft - by her delight in intricately worked and woven surfaces which both honour the labour of their making and acknowledge the potential impermanence of an object in materials that are vulnerable to change. At the heart of her way of working is a playful and unashamed delight in the potential of making a beautiful thing which belongs in the present but connects deeply to the past.
Born in Chile in 1974, Unzueta arrived in New York in 2000 and for the last four years she has been based in Berlin. Her work is in many institutional collections worldwide including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Tate, London. Two major presentations of her work in the UK, a solo exhibition ‘Tools for Life’ at Modern Art Oxford and a substantial installation at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery were thwarted by covid induced closures in 2020, so it is with huge pleasure that Ingleby brings her work back to the UK for an Instalment presentation.