The abandoned and dormant landscapes of the West Coast of the United States have always held a special attraction for photographer and architect Iñaki Bergera. These scenarios of secondary roads, far from the major highways, were the ones he traveled between June and August 2012 and in which, almost fortunately, he located gas stations that were progressively abandoned with the arrival of large multinationals in the 90s. As a result of this trip, what today is Twentysix (Abandoned) Gasoline Stationsa exhibition produced by the Museo Universidad de Navarra, which was presented on Wednesday, April 25.

The sample, consisting of a series of 26 photographs and a video made by the artist himself - graduate Oil Derrick-, can be visited from April 25 to October 14 at conference room Torre. In the presentation to the media, the artist has been accompanied by Valentín Vallhonrat, director artistic of the Museum.

Bergera has explained that he has always felt "a critical fascination for the American landscape, for its state of withdrawal, of homage to time and report. There are no people in these places and it is not something premeditated. I am the one who inhabits them with my gaze". Likewise, he has underlined the important weight in his work of the relationship between architecture and photography, and the gaze that this starting point implies.

In this sense, the artist has pointed out his interest in "the morphology and the abstract condition" of gas stations, functional pieces that he began to portray without a fixed pathway , in different road trips through the American highways of states such as Arizona, New Mexico and California. "I had a hunting attitude," he notes.

In Twentysix (Abandoned) Gasoline Stations, Bergera also pays tribute to artist Ed Ruscha, a major influence on the pop art and conceptual photography scene. Ruscha, fifty years before Bergera, traveled the iconic Route 66, and photographed 26 gas stations, still active, which he later published in the book Twenty Six Gasoline Stations.

The Museum has published a catalog of the exhibition, which can now be purchased at the museum store and online. The book, which reproduces the pieces that are part of the sample, is prefaced by Alberto Martín, founder of the Centro de Fotografías de la Universidad de Salamanca. The price is 24 euros.

This evening, at 7 p.m., the artist will offer a masterclass accompanied by art critic and curator Horacio Fernández, at the Museum's classroom 1. This will be followed at 8 p.m. by the inauguration and opening of conference room of the exhibition.

THE ARTIST

Iñaki Bergera (Vitoria, 1972) is an architect and holds a PhD from the University of Navarra and Senior Associate Professor at the University of Zaragoza. With a scholarship from 'la Caixa', he graduated from the Master in Design Studies at Harvard University. researcher at the CCA in Montreal, the Center for Creative Photography in Arizona or the International Center of Photography in New York, he has directed the national project Photography and modern architecture in Spain and curated exhibitions at the ICO Museum (PHE 2014 and 2016). In 2001 he made programs of study of photography at the Harvard School of Visual Arts and since then he develops a photographic work embodied in solo exhibitions such as America, urban landscape (2006), A Tale of Two Cities (2008), In the landscape ( 2010) and Twentysix (Abandoned) Gasoline Stations (SCAN 2014, PHE 2015) and in collective exhibitions such as Change of course ( Tabacalera, 2017), The creation of contemporary landscape ( Alcobendas, 2016) or Unfinished (Venice, 2016).