Isabel Nuño de Buen

Isabel Nuño de Buen (b. 1985, Mexico City, Mexico) lives and works in Hanover, Germany and Mexico City, Mexico.

The work of Isabel Nuño de Buen is ambitious, not only in terms of scale, but most importantly, in terms of scope. Incorporating sculpture, drawing and installation, she makes allegorical portraits of both the self and human civilization as an ongoing, multifarious and incompletable project. As such, hers is an essentially fragmented practice, which is characterized by a sense of fluctuating open-endedness, and which always gestures toward a much larger, ever-evolving, and unknowable whole. There is the sense that what she makes are conundrums which, if fully deconstructed and studied, would not so much disclose as erase their own mysteries; their semi-inscrutable promise of intelligibility and meaning becoming an allegory of both the self and civilization. Far from literal or didactic, the work, and its multiple, potential significations, plays with and exists on the threshold of comprehension, much like former civilizations and our complete, knowable selves exist on the threshold of our understanding, but ultimately remain just beyond our grasp.

Recent solo exhibitions include Garden of Time, Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich, 2024; Now and Away, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, 2023; Isabel Nuño de Buen – SPRENGEL PREIS 2021, Sprengel Museum Hannover, Hannover, 2021; In another time and space, Lulu, Mexico City, 2021; and in fugue, Kunstverein Hannover, Hannover, 2020.

Recent group exhibitions include Companions of the Sun, Station, Berlin, 2023; andDistant Voices, Galeria Stereo, Warsaw, 2021.