Singular Spaces II : From the Eccentric to the Extraordinary in Spanish Art Environments

This two-volume set marks Jo Farb Hernández’s fifty years of scholarship on art environments and the capstone of her work on self-taught artists who have built art environments in Spain. Singular Spaces II evolved from her 2013 book, Singular Spaces. Together these works constitute an encyclopaedic exploration of Spanish art environments and an epic narration of the stories of those who made them.

Singular Spaces II introduces and examines 99 artists and their intriguing and idiosyncratic sculptures, homes, and gardens, most of which have never been thoroughly documented or previously published. The author has cast a wide net to ensure all regions of Spain are represented, as are all kinds of spaces assembled with all kinds of materials.

These sites are developed organically, without formal architectural or engineering plans: they are at once evolving and complete. Often highly fanciful and quixotic, the work is frequently characterised by incongruous juxtapositions, the result of a dynamic approach to creation that may appear impulsive and spontaneous. But these artists and their works have much to teach us about the process of creation and also about the confidence to undertake a path radically different from the one they had followed during the prime of their working lives.

Hernández combines detailed case studies of the artists and their work with contextualised historical and theoretical references to a broad range of interlocking fields, including art, art history, anthropology, vernacular architecture, Spanish area studies, and folklore, complemented with compelling visuals of each of the artists and their artworks. Breaking down the standard compartmentalisation of genres, she reveals how most creators of art environments, building within their own personal spaces, fuse their creations with their daily life in a way generally unmatched in any other circumstances of making art, in the process providing an open self-reflection of their life and concerns. The universality of the need to create, and the issues that are confronted when one does so in a public and non-sanctioned way, are relevant to art and artists worldwide.