Cristina Iglesias

Cristina Iglesias is a Spanish installation artist and sculptor. She utilizes various materials in her work, including steel, water, glass, bronze, bamboo, and straw.

Biography of Cristina Iglesias

Born in San Sebastián, Northern Spain in 1956, Iglesias began a degree in Chemical Sciences at Universidad del País Vasco in 1976, before switching to ceramics and drawing in Barcelona in 1978.

In 1980, she relocated to London to pursue Sculpture at the Chelsea College of Art, where she met her husband, Juan Muñoz, and other artists like Anish Kapoor. Iglesias started exhibiting in the 1980s and has participated in over 60 solo and group exhibitions across Europe, North America, and Japan.

Iglesias received the National Award for Plastic Arts in 1999, and in 2012, she was honored with the Berliner Kunstpreis.

She has crafted a distinctive sculptural language, constructing immersive environments that draw from architecture, literature, and culturally site-specific influences. Using a blend of constructed and natural forms, employing materials such as suspended pavilions, latticed panels, passageways, mazes, walls with embedded texts, and structural and vegetative elements, she creatively reshapes space, blurring boundaries between inside and outside, natural and artificial. This fusion of industrial and natural materials creates unexpected sensory experiences for viewers.

In 2016, Iglesias received the Tambor del Oro in San Sebastian. She was the first Spanish woman to exhibit her work at the Folkestone Triennial in 2011. She has participated in numerous international exhibitions, representing Spain at the 1986 and 1993 Venice Biennales and the Sydney Biennale in 2012.

Her notable recent public commissions include "Forgotten Streams" at Bloomberg Headquarters in London (2017) and the substantial permanent public commission titled "Tres Aguas – a Project for Toledo" in Toledo, Spain (2014). In 2020, Cristina Iglesias received the Royal Academy Architecture Prize in London.

The artist lives and works in Torrelodones, Madrid.