The Directors of Marlborough Gallery are pleased to announce the exhibition of the Spanish-born, world-renowned artist architect, Santiago Calatrava. This will be Calatrava’s first solo exhibition with Marlborough Gallery, and will be comprised of drawings, ceramics, and sculpture. The show will open on Thursday, April 24, with an opening reception from 6-8pm, and continues through May 31.

Santiago Calatrava’s work continues to shape and redefine the boundaries that have historically separated fine arts from architecture and engineering. Calatrava challenges such boundaries through the creation of a broad range of works including ceramics, drawings, paintings, sculpture, architecture and engineering projects that in total express a unified esthetic anchored in the artist’s belief that the origins of artistic invention reside in the evolutionary structure of the natural world.

His work often begins in loosely drawn sketches that become more formally styled in his sculpture, and finally in his architectural projects. Calatrava states: “The sketch is the instrument that helps me materialize the ideas at another level. And the most abstract way to do studies of morphology probably is sculpture. One draws the human body to understand the movement, the gesture. The place, the landscape, the human landscape, and topography are important for me. These will inspire or bring the essence [to a project]. Then, also, the analysis of the functional program is important. You can channel all the impulses of free thinking, free feeling, shape, form, the natural [flow], and this goes from the sketches and the human body into the sculptures.”

Indeed, Calatrava’s first skyscraper, the Turning Torso in Malmö, Sweden, is based on the contortions of the human spine. In Spain, Calatrava designed a planetarium in the shape of an eye. The Milwaukee Art Museum forms an open wingspan. As Calatrava states, “…it’s true that there’s something essential in the construction of our body… [even] in my hands, there is a little bit of architecture and engineering. What architecture does is what a coat does for our body. It wraps us.”

Kosme de Barañano, the Spanish art critic and former director of the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM), writes: “…Calatrava constructs a rhythm of elements that constitute themselves as a sculpture. The hands and their movement, the wings of birds and their folding, the leaves of trees, constitute, for Calatrava, both formal and dynamic references due their movements of closure; for their capacity to open and close themselves.”

Calatrava’s artwork has been recently exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2005), the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (2012), and the Vatican Museum in Rome (2013). His work is part of a number of international public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Among his many international architectural projects, his most recent is the in-progress World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York. We are proud to announce that Calatrava will be exhibiting seven monumental sculptures along Park Avenue in New York City in 2015.

An illustrated catalogue, with an essay by Kosme de Barañano, will be available at the time of the exhibition.