Iñaki Bonillas
Photo: María Minera
Iñaki Bonillas
Mexican born 1981
Level 2
NGV International
View on map
PROJECT
Books are both the source and subject of Iñaki Bonillas’s photographs. As is the case for so many of us, Bonillas’s earliest experiences with art and photography were not firsthand but through the mediated experience of the printed page. In his series Marginalia Bonillas explores the idea that the white borders on the edge of an illustrated page can become the connection between one image and the next, and one reader and the next. In a 2020 interview he said, ‘We as readers don’t get as involved with those empty spaces and I started thinking if there was a possibility to engage more deeply with those white spaces. This is how the investigation became what to do with those margins’.
ABOUT
Iñaki Bonillas is a conceptual artist who works in intriguing ways with photography. Personal, biographical narrative is repositioned through a quasi-scientific approach to composition and material. Printmaking as a means of transforming archival material is a central focus in Bonillas’s practice. By reframing and editing found imagery, and subsequently creating a sense of permanence through the repetition and multiplication inherent to printmaking, Bonillas transforms his interpretations into a new reality. He gives physical form to the deep-rooted, and often subconscious, process of self-editing we perform throughout our lives.
Purchased, NGV Foundation, 2023