Iván Navarro: Light Years – A Major Retrospective at Templon New York
Templon New York presents Iván Navarro: Light Years, a comprehensive exhibition offering a chronological overview of the artist’s work from 2004 to the present. Conceived as an anniversary exhibition, Light Years marks a double milestone: the gallery’s 60th anniversary and more than twenty years of collaboration with Iván Navarro.
The exhibition is structured around three foundational works that define the conceptual core of Navarro’s practice: Landless Land (2023), Flashlight: I’m Not From Here, I’m Not From There (2006), and Resistance (2009). Envisioned as electrically animated sculptures activated through movement and video performance, these works exemplify the artist’s strategy of transforming utilitarian objects into political and existential instruments. Their titles, borrowed from electrical terminology, anchor metaphor in material reality and underscore Navarro’s critical approach.
The exhibition opens with Landless Land, a 2023 silent reworking of the original Homeless Lamp, The Juice Sucker (2004–2005), now part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s collection in New York. Here, light functions not as illumination but as a condition of survival, becoming a powerful metaphor for hope, displacement, and statelessness. Produced during the same period, Blue Electric Chair (2004) introduces a key pillar of Navarro’s practice: political resistance. By transforming an object associated with state violence into a luminous structure, the work simultaneously references modern furniture design while confronting systems of power, punishment, and control.
Flashlight: I’m Not From Here, I’m Not From There, held in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., explores themes of territorial identity and unstable belonging, activated through the body and narrated via video. In Resistance, first presented at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 and now in the collection of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Santiago, Chile, electricity is generated through physical effort, literalizing opposition as friction within systems of power. These three projects are accompanied by music, highlighting the role of lyricism as a fundamental component of Navarro’s artistic language. That same year, Drums (2009) further develops this exploration, positioning music as a political and social tool and transforming percussion into a sculptural and performative act that amplifies the collective power of sound and silence.
Alongside these seminal works, Light Years brings together a constellation of 23 pieces, ranging from the Shell Shock series (2024–2025) to a tribute to Josef Albers and Francisco de Goya, Esto Es Malo, No Se Puede Mirar (This Is Bad, One Can’t Look) (2013). Installations incorporating the infinite mirror motif introduce another recurring metaphor in Navarro’s work: the mirror as a reflection of contemporary experience—endless, unstable, and under constant surveillance. The artist’s use of one-way mirrors also draws direct references to police interrogation rooms. Influenced by Op Art and concrete poetry, these works form a visual language that invites viewers to observe, feel, question, and listen.
Light Years underscores Iván Navarro’s international recognition, with works held in major public collections worldwide, including the Bronx Museum (New York, USA), the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, USA), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (USA), the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (Paris, France), the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum (Madrid, Spain), Fundación ARCO (Madrid, Spain), the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul, South Korea), and the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia), among many others.
