Iván Navarro

Homeless Lamp, the Juice Sucker, 2004-2005, Fluorescen lamps, wheels, and color video, with sound, 4 min., 31 sec.

Born in 1972 in Santiago, Iván Navarro grew up under the Pinochet dictatorship. He has lived and worked in New York since 1997. Iván Navarro uses light as his raw material, turning objects into electric sculptures and transforming the exhibition space by means of visual interplay. His work is certainly playful, but is also haunted by questions of power, control and imprisonment. The act of usurping the minimalist aesthetic is an ever-present undercurrent, becoming the pretext for understated political and social criticism.

Ivan Navarro loves building lamps. When he began using electric lights in Chile during the ’90s, there were few places for young artists to show their work.

Galleries weren’t keen to welcome a new generation of artists, so he searched for non-artistic exhibition venues such as a building lobby or a friend’s living room to introduce his art as a part of architectural spaces.

Then he realised that art could be considered furniture as the only way to exhibit his works was to create functional objects. They looked like lamps but were sculptures in disguise.

A decade on, his lamps seem to come somewhere between the realms of design and art. And Homeless Lamp, The Juice Sucker, his video about a lamp with two protagonists wheeling a shopping trolley with white fluorescent bulbs through Chelsea’s gallery district in Manhattan and plugging into lampposts to power up their cart, has become a symbol of poverty, alienation and survival.

“What is important is that every one of my works is almost a criticism of the one before it,” Ivan insists. “That’s how I keep creating. I don’t look for political issues to spark a new piece. I’m very focused on the process.”

He adds: “Previously, I played with the idea that furniture could also be a sculpture and then I said, what if these pieces moved? The trolley revealed other meanings, too. I think that once you do something well with a certain material, the meanings come through.”

“This logic also gives a lot of freedom. For instance, you could say ‘I’m making a chair and what’s the opposite of a chair?’ Then you look for another object that makes sense in that logic, and you make it.”

SOLO EXHIBITIONS (SELECTION)

2025 TEMPLON, Paris, France 2024

Reloj Solar, Galeria Madre, Santiago, Chile

2023 Silent Homeless Lamp, installation temporaire, Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, USA 

Iván Navarro, Peninsula Hotel, New York, USA 

Eccidio, MicroMuseo di Arte Contemporanea della Tuscia, Viterbo, Italy

2022 Celestialand, TEMPLON, New York, USA 

Thunder, Martin Asbaek Gallery in collaboration with TEMPLON, Copenhagen, Denmark

COLLECTIONS (SELECTION) 

Musée Thyssen, Madrid, Spain 

21C Museum, Louisville, USA 

The Bangkok EDITION, Bangkok, Thailand 

Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, Turkey 

Caldic Collection, Rotterdam, The Netherlands 

Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain 

CENTRO University, Mexico City, Mexico