Artwork
#artwork historical past
#basketball
#beads
#Jorge Mañes Rubio
#sculpture
#sports activities
April 25, 2024
Kate Mothes
Starting with an iconic but widespread spherical kind, Jorge Mañes Rubio reimagines basketballs as highly effective entities in his collection New Prophets. Ornamented with stylized creatures, botanicals, and figures, every sculpture tells its personal enigmatic story, drawing on the inextricable hyperlink between previous and current. “These works, though acquainted in visible language, appear to return from a dream-like dimension,” the artist tells Colossal, “as if providing an opportunity at re-enchanting the world we stay in.”
New Prophets started with a fascination with an Eighth-century Spanish illuminated manuscript known as the Commentary on the Apocalypse that’s embellished in a Mozarabic fashion, which originated in Spain and represents a mix of Romanesque, Islamic, and Byzantine traditions. Rubio, who’s at the moment primarily based in Amsterdam, is fascinated by cultural alternate all through historical past. He says:
My inventive apply operates on an analogous approach: I’m claiming an area the place I can proceed to be taught from a crucible of essentially the most numerous influences, whereas on the identical time carving my very own distinctive path. I wish to proceed to discover cross-cultural themes and symbols that replicate and honour the intensive circulation of concepts, works, and those who got here earlier than us.
World-building is central to Rubio’s apply, and initially, he thought of one other spherical form for this collection as a literal illustration of the world: a globe. “The colonial and imperial connotations of this artifact actually discouraged me,” he says, however when by probability he positioned a string of beads on a basketball that was kicking round his studio, the concept for New Prophets clicked.
Rubio coats the balls with plaster and gesso—making certain it doesn’t deflate—criss-crosses the shape alongside its distinctive traces, and provides vibrant flowers, stylized textual content, medieval motifs, and legendary creatures. The orbs play with the concept of an object designed to be bounced and thrown round, as a substitute coating it with delicate patterns and displaying it like a sacred relic.
In his different worlds, Rubio is involved in visualizing how previous, current, and future can unfold concurrently. “My hope is that my works invite individuals to rethink our relationship with the universe and all of the beings that stay in it —human, nonhuman, materials, or religious— suggesting options to established techniques of illustration, energy and exploitation,” he says. “I imagine this extra animistic perspective has the potential to offer a extra beneficiant, humbling perspective to make sense of the world we stay in.”
Rubio is at the moment working towards a few present in 2025 and persevering with New Prophets. Discover extra on the artist’s web site, and keep updated on Instagram.
#artwork historical past
#basketball
#beads
#Jorge Mañes Rubio
#sculpture
#sports activities
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