“What can sculpture build today?” I ask Cristina Iglesias. “New places where people can meet and experience an extraordinary moment, one they will want to return to. Works, like light, are constantly changing,” the Spanish artist replies warmly. Cement, glass, wood, cast aluminum, and resin coexist in her practice, materials that allow her to maintain a fluid dialogue with her surroundings and, above all, with nature. Iglesias’s monumental works rise up to create mysterious, enveloping spaces, highly theatrical environments in which the viewer’s perception is transformed. Iglesias has revolutionized the discipline by combining volume with shadow, weight with lightness, the permanent with the portable. Drawing on science fiction and poetry, literary genres that inspire her process, she has conceived a world that hovers between reality and fantasy.
The sculptor, who was born in San Sebastián, Spain, has presented major projects and public artworks well beyond her country’s borders. She has had several key installations in the United States, including “Landscape and Memory,” a series of bronze sculptural pools displayed at New York’s Madison Square Park in 2022, and “Below the Visible,” a reimagining of a public fountain installed on the Princeton University campus this year. Next, she will open an exhibition of new works at Hauser & Wirth in New York City in November.
As she moves from one project to the next around the world, Iglesias is also immersed in two major undertakings closer to home: A retrospective of her work will be presented at Paris’s Fondation Cartier in 2028, and she was one of three artists selected to submit a design proposal for the Glory facade at Barcelona’s Sagrada Família—the third and final facade of Antoni Gaudí’s unfinished masterpiece, the ultimate expression of Catalan Modernist architecture. For Iglesias, there are no limits.
What is your aim when you create?
I am interested in the possibility that a work can be walked through, inhabited, but also imagined. That it does not end with its own form, but opens onto a space that is not physically present. When that happens, sculpture ceases to be something contemplated from the outside and begins to become part of the world that the person visiting or observing it constructs through their own perception. That is when it truly begins to exist.
What is the driving force behind your work?
Curiosity. The need to keep learning; to understand the world, and my way of inhabiting it, a little better. I do not feel that I have arrived at any definitive destination; rather, I feel that I am part of an ongoing process. And I believe that is precisely what keeps alive the need to create new work.
Prototyping with wax and resins.
How does climate change enter into your practice?
Thinking about natural processes makes it impossible not to become aware of their fragility and of the changes we are causing. Rather than illustrating the problem, I’m interested in reminding people that we are part of one interconnected system. Some works attempt to make visible what normally remains hidden, such as the life beneath the surface of the water or the complexity of certain ecosystems.
What role do water and the sea play?
Water never remains the same in nature. It changes with the light, reflects, disappears, and produces sound. I am interested in it because, when I create sequences with water, it introduces the element of time into the work. Growing up beside the Atlantic has probably influenced this relationship, too. The sea has always taught me that the landscape is not fixed, but a reality in perpetual motion.
And what do you think art can contribute in the face of the environmental crisis?
Art should not tell the viewer what to think. It can offer an experience that awakens a more attentive gaze toward the world around us. When a work enables us to perceive a place differently, it can also change our relationship with it. I believe art has the power to awaken an awareness of the importance of living alongside nature.
Detail of “Dome” (2026).
How do you conceive of the relationship between the work and the viewer?
I have never thought of the viewer as passive. A work should be discovered gradually, making people stop, change their position, and look again. Some things only reveal themselves when we give them time. At a moment when almost everything happens at great speed, that experience of attention seems especially valuable to me.
How vital is it to work in public space at this moment?
I think it is more important than ever. Cities need places where people can meet, but also pause and think. Public space is not simply somewhere to pass through; it is where we create a shared memory. I’m interested in the possibility that art might contribute to that collective experience.
This story will appear in the November 2026 issue of ELLE.