Shadows, 2017 - 2018

The different sculptures that make up the Shadows series are composed of layers of carbon steel sheets. Words are engraved into the steel, and their overlapping forms create hymns; fragments of statements blend together in the viewer’s eye. Some textual elements come from political posters, while others are drawn from love declarations.

Blending the intimate and the political, Shadows is one of many works by Iván Argote in which the artist uses text and decontextualized statements, presented through various media: concrete (Skin), fabric (Covers & Fabrics), and more. The Shadows series stems from Iván Argote’s long-term research into the history of ideologies, text, and their impact on the formation of subjectivities.