ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

Utilizando elementos de la naturaleza y en la naturaleza, Andy Goldsworthy (Cheshire, Inglaterra, 1956) ha venido desarrollando una de las trayectorias artísticas más singulares de la plástica actual. Su trabajo se caracteriza por la sutileza, la levedad y la intensidad poética de las formas que recrea en conexión con el paisaje, con la energía y el proceso de crecimiento intrínseco de los elementos naturales. En el Palacio de Cristal del Parque del Retiro realizó una pieza adaptada a la propia planta del edificio, con tres grandes cúpulas formadas por troncos procedentes de talas de madera de desecho, estableciendo un diálogo con las formas arquitectónicas y los materiales del Palacio de Cristal.

For forty years, Andy Goldsworthy has worked with an extraordinary range of natural materials, often at their source.On an almost daily basis, he makes works of art using the materials and conditions that he encounters wherever he is, be it the land around his Scottish home, the mountain regions of France or Spain, or the pavements of New York City, Glasgow, or Rio de Janeiro. Out of earth, rocks, leaves, ice, snow, rain, sunlight and shadow he makes artworks that exist briefly before they are altered and erased by natural processes. They are documented in his photographs, and their larger meanings are bound up with the conditions, forces and processes that they embody: materiality, temporality, growth, vitality, permanence, decay, chance, labour and memory.Ephemeral Works features approximately two hundred of these works, selected by Goldsworthy from thousands he has made between 2001 and the present, and arranged in chronological sequence, capturing his creative process as it interacts with material, place, and the passage of time and seasons.

Time, always an element in the work of Andy Goldsworthy - both as a medium and as a metaphor - is celebrated in this book. Text contributions are compiled from Goldsworthy''s own diaries of visits to five locations in North America and Europe.

The journeys that people, rivers, landscapes and even stone take through space and time are central to this book. An account of a cairn built on the crest of a small hill at the entrance to the village in Scotland where Andy Goldsworthy lives reveals the importance of his work close to home, which is the inspiration for so much that he then creates elsewhere. Three cairns similar to the one in Scotland now span the United States, marking the artist''s own journey across the States as well as the culmination of a form that has played a significant element in his work for the last twenty years. The vigorous beauty of Goldsworthy''s work and its connection to death and decay are articulated in a series of works with elm trees. Made next to a small river in the south west of Scotland, the works range from glowing yellow leaves to dead branches that celebrate the life cycle of the elm. The flow and passage of time are explored and strongly expressed by Goldsworthy''s works relating to water. Over the past few years the artist has developed an almost obsessive need to work alongside rivers and the sea.Ephemeral works made on the beach and in rivers change and disappear in response to the ebb and flow of water. Passage includes Goldsworthy''s most recent commission, the Garden of Stones at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Eighteen granite boulders, varying in weight from three to fifteen tons, were hollowed out from below with a thermal lance and filled with earth. Oak trees were planted through a small hole in the top of each stone at a ceremony participated in by several Holocaust survivors. These trees, not just surviving but growing in an almost impossible situation, have powerful associations in a garden intended as a Holocaust Memorial.

Andy Goldsworthy is one of the leading British sculptors working with nature in the landscape. He has made remarkable sculptures from natural materials around the world, and enjoys an international reputation. This beautifully produced, highly praised and readable book combines superlative illustrations with specially commissioned essays by leading writers familiar with the artist and his work.