Ira Lombardía. Geometry Lessons

14.03.2025 > 16.05.2025

Ira Lombardía’s line of research transcends all cataloging but has remained firm in that direction that we would call post-photographic nowadays. Her methodology is based on the systematic questioning of hegemonic paradigms: those inherited from the Era of Enlightenment, from European Postmodernism and Poststructuralism, that have permeated contemporary artistic practice until it has been drained of its life, but also interrogating the crude and sophisticated political models of preserving established power, based on a Darwinist, capitalist, patriarchal, and pyramidal vision of society. These models translate into the exploitation of the land, the sea, the women, and the people from the Global South, which are identified as resources. First geometry lesson: the pyramid.

The second lesson in geometry presented in this exhibition is based on the square, a non-existent form in the natural world that represents the intellectual utopia of Eurocentric mathematical, philosophical, and ideological systems. With subtle irony, Lombardía associates this primary form in Western education (“draw a square”) with the exacerbated masculinity of minimalism, the quintessential postmodern artistic movement. Lombardía’s artistic practice is based on research into archives, museums, libraries, documents, and primary sources, whose images she extracts, rethinks, and recontextualizes. She redefines them with strategies ranging from juxtaposition and assembly to the generation of three-dimensional objects that hold to be sculptural and increasingly come closer to architecture to constructing spaces that invite reflection.

For Lombardía, whose teaching work is inseparable from her artistic career, the circle is the geometric figure that symbolizes this space of transmission and generation of knowledge. A form that evokes both the origin and infinity and the cyclical nature of life, primarily rooted in ancestral cultures and connected with female sociability (the feared coven), Lombardía’s circle also speaks to the need to escape the logic of overproduction. The ecology of images, present when Lombardía recycles, consciously renouncing to photograph, is associated in this work with traditional sustainable agroecosystems such as the milpa, a non-anthropocentric way of relating to the earth and its fertility. The fertility of the planet and the soil, in turn, is related to that of women and their possible self-management thanks to the contraceptive pill, patented in Mexico in 1951. Feminism, ecology, and motherhood are three essential axes in Lombardía’s recent production.

María Santoyo