Carreras Mugica is pleased to present “CONTRA EL OLVIDO. Homenajes y Ofrendas”, Ángel Bados’ second exhibition at the gallery. In it you will be able to see his latest works made with materials as diverse as cardboard, textile, bronze and various objects.
Ángel Bados (Olazagutia, 1945) studied Fine Arts at the Real Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, where he graduated in 1973, specialising in sculpture. In the mid 1970s he developed his artistic work in Pamplona in the field of conceptual art and installations.
From the beginning and throughout his professional career, he has combined his work as a sculptor with teaching art.
In 1983 he moved to Bilbao, where he became a lecturer in the Sculpture Department of the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country. There he came into contact with a series of artists (Tx. Badiola, J. L. Moraza, P. Irazu, M. L. Fernández) with whom he shared a studio. From the proximity between them and the discussions they held on the art of the time, the group known as Nueva Escultura Vasca (New Basque Sculpture) emerged, which contributed to the renewal of Spanish art in the 1980s.

His attitude, reluctant to exhibitions, has led him to present his work on a few occasions and very distanced in time. His last solo show was in this same Carreras Mugica gallery in 2017. However, his work is present in important public and private collections such as: the Helga de Alvear Foundation, Cáceres; the ‘la Caixa’ Foundation, Barcelona; Museud’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid; Museo Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Bilbao; Artium, Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo de Vitoria-Gasteiz; Museo San Telmo, Donostia/San Sebastián or in the Museo de Navarra, Pamplona.
His teaching activity includes numerous sculpture workshops in different institutions in Spain, most notably those held at Arteleku (1990, 1992, 1994, 1997), some of them co-directed with Txomin Badiola.
In 2008, the Jorge Oteiza Museum Foundation commissioned him to order the so-called Experimental Laboratory for subsequent exhibition at the Alzuza Museum. The result of this research is the book Oteiza. Experimental Laboratory. Laborategi Esperimentala, of which he is the author. In 2018 he was awarded the National Plastic Arts Prize.

The exhibition will be inaugurated with the presence of the artist on Friday 19 September at 18h.

“The works in the exhibition will begin around 2020 and 2021, once the ordering of the painting of my friend Isabel Baquedano has been completed. Whose memory, how she entrusted the painting to the vicissitudes of the very act of painting, has regulated the trance of taking up the task of sculpture again and doing it day by day without fear of making a mistake.
I feel that not much time has passed since then, perhaps because the pieces have needed to escape the vertiginous speed of world events, where things seem to come out of nowhere and return to nowhere without leaving any mark. And I would like to believe that, as we are determined to disrupt the significant masters of our adventures, and consequently orphaned from the narratives of totality, we will have to pay careful attention to the small ‘inventions’ that emerge, unexpected, pregnant with contingency, it is true, but guardians of what has no name, and in all probability guarantors of the freedom of what we do.

In this way, the tributes have offered me the figure of an addressee, ready to act as a representative of each of you when you look at the pieces, which is no small thing. Sometimes it’s about the person close to us who helps us to walk (Trampolín para la Niña Martina), but also about those who have been mercilessly touched by the fire of creation (Kirchner in Davos and R. Walser in Herisau). In the same direction, the titles promote the use of symbolic components by facilitating the representational function entrusted to art.  The role assigned to the offerings is not easy to illustrate, because, possibly, beneath such boldness, there is the sacrificial component of risking one’s sanity in the field of the largely unknown Other. I have always had a need to look at Arab art and culture. The most recent works border on another verse of Ar-Rusafi from Valencia ‘if they return we will come to greet them’ for a sort of sculptor’s offer (Litoral de Partida, Si el Mar pudiera hacerse de Jardines), to the citizens of other cultures when they risk the passage to our territory, more or less close, and all too often closed and inhospitable.

But before and after such arguments, the operation is ultimately about giving meaning to the work, under the invocation and commemoration of art and sculpture as always: Lespugue’s Venus next to Pablo Picasso’s Lady Offering; or Portrait of My Wife and You are Pedro (figurative or abstract depending on the subject, as Jorge Oteiza would say). In parallel, we could point out Brunelleschi’s Dome, looking technically at the sky of Florence; or the buildings of Alvar Aalto in Finland and the architecture of Álvaro Siza in Portugal, whose enjoyment and contemplation lead me to say that architecture, like sculpture, ‘weighs upwards’. It is not in vain that they share similar principles when it comes to configuring the spatio-temporal event that is proper to them, elucidated between the abstract condition of the formal structure and the unbearable physical quality of the material, which makes the work resolve itself definitively on the side of satisfaction. 

I offer you the quote of the titles, although, as you can see in the room, the sculptures tend to share them with each other”.
Bilbao. August 2025
A.B.

Trampolín para la Niña Martina                                                             For Both Sides of the Border (2017-2023)
Libanesa, for Marta I.                                                                                For Both Sides of the Border (2024-2025)
One and Three Landscapes, for my Friends                                         Litoral de Partida
the Basque Sculptors                                                                                 If the Sea could be Made of Gardens
For E. Kirchner in Davos:
Footbridge and Flow                                                                                 Plegaria
The Little Bonfire                                                                                       To an Unknown God
Untitled
The Platform

For R. Walser in Herisau:
                               When Mirages were Fountains
                               The Cloud and the Garden
                               Untitled

                               Escabel de Nieve, I y II

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