BIOGRAPHY
Irune J. Orbea (Bilbao, 1976) lives and works between Bilbao and Paris. This artist, who graduated in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country, held individual shows in 2012 at the Museo de la Ciudad in Mostoles (Madrid) and at the Torre de Ariz (Basauri-Bizkaia). Donostia-San Sebastian, Bilbao and Berlin are amongst the cities where her work was shown in 2011, to which must be added numerous collective shows, both in the Spanish State and abroad. In 2012 and 2008 she received the resident artist scholarship from the BilbaoArte Fundazioa and she has also obtained various aids for artistic creation from the Regional Council of Bizkaia. As a photographer, Irune has also collaborated on other performance projects alongside Itziar Barrio, Raketa Brokobich and the Katastrofen Group, as well as in a number of shoots. Her works are represented in the Fundación BilbaoArte, the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao City Hall and a variety of private collections.
ABOUT MY WORK
My work is always trying to question the limits between fiction and reality, and how the fiction from the media is coming into our privacy and contributes to build it. I am trying to find the frontiers of fiction versus reality which nowadays are so blurred. I do it by showing how the spectacles screen hipper-realism and fiction at the same level and we absorb both in our daily life as unity. All that mirages become substitutes and regulate our experience and form our knowledge but also leave us certain emptiness. The language I use is mostly the juxtaposition of ideas by putting them together with many tools, such as draws, performances, installations and mostly photographs. I use installations inside the photographs to build a scenery, and outside by choosing with care the materials I use and how they are placed in the space, so much so that sometimes the photographs transcend the represented images and become objects. Its not just a juxtaposition of the reality and the fiction, the privacy and the public, the natural life and the fake one, it seems a victory of the simulation versus real life.
Each project is a new beginning built with the previous foundations and in between them the unity is more conceptual than esthetical, but in all of them there is the same style. I use the repetition of some construction elements as basic building blocks arranged to communicate an idea, and all my work has also the feeling of silence in the background that link with the idea of emptiness, with the idea that this life its not enough. I am going to show some of them chronologically starting by the closer ones in time.
