carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce its first solo exhibition with Spanish artist Néstor Sanmiguel Diest, a founding member of the A Ua Crag collective and a leading figure of the 1980s avant-garde in Aragon.

Sanmiguel Diest began to pursue his artistic practice while initially maintaining a career as a pattern maker. Although the artist has long left his work in the field of applied arts behind,this experience — combined with his voracious interest in literature and philosophy — has exerted a broader influence on Sanmiguel Diest‘s schematic thinking and the quasi-mathematical structures that inform his creative process. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s notion of difference and repetition as positive forces with unpredictable effects also provides one of the conceptual anchors of the artist’s practice, which he explicitly references in the work La Parte Ustraída Adquire Una Nueva Naturaleza (16/11/15) (2015). Like the fictive Pierre Menard, who painstakingly copies Cervantes Don Quixote in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,” Sanmiguel Diest faithfully reproduces an excerpt of Deleuze’s text — but in Spanish translation.