Alicia Martín

Alicia Martín works in several disciplines: sculpture, photography, video, installation and drawing. But it is sculpture in which she has been most prolific and in which she has obtained the greatest recognition. At the beginning of the nineties she began to incorporate books as a physical element in her work, and this has become one of her hallmarks. The artist herself says the following: “On the way from the studio to my house, and from home to the studio, I always used to carry a book, and it was the act of reading, and starting to think of the book as an object, with its smells and its textures, which made me take the step.”

Books are the raw material from which she makes almost all of her work. From the photographs and video montages that she makes from her compositions, to the large-format sculptures and installations in which hundreds of books of various colours, sizes and shapes make up large structures that are usually created ad hoc for a public space, museum or exhibition.

The book as a vehicle for transmitting culture, its universality and daily life, endows Alicia Martín's work with a powerful symbolic charge and, consequently, with multiple interpretations.

Her works are present in Spain’s leading institutional collections, such as the MNCARS, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madrid, the Musac in León, the DA2 in Salamanca, the MAS in Santander, the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela and the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid. She has also carried out international projects in major cities of Europe, United States and Latin America.