Biography
Studio of Elena Mendizabal, Bilbao
«The notion of style, understood as recognizable formal characteristics that remain constant, is not my thing. Without intending it to be, freedom in the process of making is freedom itself.
In my work, I use different languages, materials, and morphologies, giving rise to the manifestation of a diversity of 'selves'.»
Elena Mendizabal
Elena Mendizabal (San Sebastián, 1960) holds one of the freest and most singular trajectories in recent sculpture in Spain, built over five decades of continuous work.
Trained at the Higher College of Fine Arts in Bilbao during the years she shared with Txomin Badiola, Juan Luis Moraza and María Luisa Fernández, she took part from the early 1980s in that moment of artistic ferment, arriving at sculpture by way of conceptual art and semiotics and soon turning, out of an abstract constructive language, toward a territory of her own, one in which that language leans toward the figure, the object and the domestic space.
What distinguishes her path is the freedom with which she has begun anew in each project, defining herself as an artist of figures rather than of any fixed style, giving rise in each work to the diverse and multifaceted manifestation of one same dynamic identity. Moving through iron and wood, added colour worn like a skin, the polyester bodies, plasticine, ceramics and three-dimensional printing, her work has held as its core the identification of sculpture with the body, understood as being, existing, feeling, and the condition of many pieces as self-portraits in different keys, metaphors that take the form of a figure. The autobiographical and the affective work in her as a source, arising spontaneously, always sustained by a formal intelligence distilled over years.
Holding a doctorate since 1993 with a thesis on the proximity between sculpture and objects, and a professor of sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the UPV/EHU since 1987, she has exhibited continuously since 1982, featuring in historical readings of her generation such as Incógnitas. Cartografías del arte contemporáneo en Euskadi (Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, 2007) and Después del 68. Arte y prácticas en el País Vasco (Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao, 2018-2019). Her work is held in collections including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Artium Museoa, the Museum of Fine Arts of Bilbao, the Basque Government and the UPV/EHU, with recent exhibitions at the Sala Menchu Gal in Irún (Ley propia, 2023-2024) and La Casa Encendida in Madrid (Oro tejido con paja, 2025-2026).