Laida Lertxundi

Laida Lertxundi is a Spanish artist, filmmaker and professor of fine arts based in the United States and the Basque Country.
Born in 1981 in Bilbao, Spain. She moved to study in the United States. Lertxundi received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Bard College. Pedagogy is central to her practice and she is currently a Professor at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. She also teaches at the Universidad del Pais Vasco, and has previously taught at the University of California, San Diego (2008-2014), Art Center College of Design (2015-2019), Pasadena and Otis College or Art and Design, Los Angeles (2015-2017), among other institutions.
Her vocation for cinema began during her studies at Bard College, when she learned about the work of different filmmakers such as Hollis Frampton, Maya Deren and Michael Snow. Laida Lertxundi makes the most photographed city in the world seem uncanny. Her films use the visual language of Hollywood cinema but omit the narrative, leaving propulsively edited works that lend equal mystery to the Los Angeles skyline, rumpled sheets, or the curve of a neck. Lertxundi employs 16mm to conjure an atmosphere of languorous solitude and longing with bursts of obscure soul music.
LUX represents her work in London and is part of the collections of the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Centre National des Arts Plastiques in Paris and various private collections. Her monographic book Landscape Plus was published with Mousse Publishing and fluent in 2019. In 2020 she received the Gure Artea award.
In her cinema, the cinematographic forms of narration are diluted and replaced by the revelation of process and materiality. Through an intense work of relationship between images and diegetic sounds, the synchrony creates a sensation of real-time and lived experience, a tension between form and that experience that always surpasses it. In this way, the more formalistic or abstract aspect of her cinema, with a structural vocation, is pierced by an emotional tone while giving rise to false clues about ambiguous fiction.
Her work has been exhibited at Cibrían, San Sebastian (2024), Highline Art, New York (2023), Artspace Aotearoa (2023), Whitney Biennial New York (2012), Hammer Museum Los Angeles (2026), LIAF Biennial (2013), Biennale de Lyon (2013), Frieze Projects New York (2014) and in museums and galleries such as MoMA in New York (2022, 2017), Tate Modern, London (2016), Whitechapel Gallery, London, Angela Mewes, Berlin (2020), Joan, Los Angeles, Cibrían, San Sebastián (2021), ARKO Art Center, Seoul (2022), McEvoy Arts Foundation, San Francisco (2021), Human Resources Los Angeles (2019), MAK Schindler House (2013), ICA, London (2013), Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia (2015), CCCB (2017, 2013, 2021, 20122), PS1 MoMA (2013), Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago (2013), Baltimore Museum of Art (2013), Kunstverein Hamburg (2014) and the Havana Biennial (2015) among others.
She has had solo exhibitions at Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz (2023), La Taller, Bilbao (2022), NoguerasBlanchard (2021), Matadero Madrid (2019), LUX London (2018), Tramway Glasgow (2018), FuturDome Milano (2019), fluent Santander (2017), Tabakalera San Sebastián (2017), DA2 Salamanca (2015), Azkuna Zentroa Bilbao, (2014), Vdrome London (2014) and Marta Cervera, (2013). Her films have been screened at numerous festivals such as Locarno Film Festival, New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Film Festival, BFI, TIFF Toronto, Gijón, San Sebastián or Edinburgh among others.