HOSTAGE 01
SOLO CSV; Movimiento 37, Madrid.
Current exhibition // Cindy Crawford. HOSTAGE 01
Interview with Cindy Crawford by Anna S.
25 May 2026
Cindy Crawford's first sculptural gesture was choosing his name.
Behind the pseudonym is a man born in Bilbao in 1974 who spent twenty-seven years fabricating and installing other people's work, the last years of it full-time inside a major London studio. A whole life among weight, rigging and suspension, holding up authorship that belonged to others with the discipline of someone who knows how matter actually behaves before he thinks about it. In 2025 that rear position turns to face front. The borrowed name is not a disguise. It is a device. A mask that SOLO describes as a cultural glitch, a deliberate fault in the system of reading that activates, before the work is even looked at, a tension between expectation and error.
HOSTAGE 01, his first solo exhibition, opens at SOLO CSV / Movimiento 37 in March 2026. It investigates the materiality of tension, the contained body, the latent energy of suspended objects. States of pressure and imbalance held between the sculptural and the performative. His only public statement to date condenses the method: "My work begins with tension, between weight and suspension, control and release." The title is explained in no press material. That silence is part of the gesture.
We spoke with him about what it means to emerge after almost three decades in the shadows, about muscular literacy as authorship, about mystery as a method, the thing he works by before the object exists, and about what an artist chooses to withhold when he names his debut with the word hostage.
Anna S. Editor-in-Chief, FVTVRIST Magazine
Opening, Cindy Crawford. HOSTAGE 01, 2026
SOLO CSV; Movimiento 37, Madrid
Courtesy or SOLO Contemporary & The Artist
Installation View, Cindy Crawford. HOSTAGE 01, 2026
SOLO CSV; Movimiento 37, Madrid
Courtesy or SOLO Contemporary & The Artist
The institutional text calls "Cindy Crawford" a cultural glitch. You took a name attached to one of the most photographed bodies of the late twentieth century and made reading it a small malfunction. What system did you want that malfunction to expose, and what happens to the work the day it stops malfunctioning?
I expose the system of authorship and value. You put one of the most visible names of the twentieth century on top of a piece that won't let itself be looked at, and the short circuit is guaranteed. Like magnets repelling each other.
The glitch repairs itself fast. The gallery, the market, the public: it all reabsorbs and carries on. No surprise. What interests me is those seconds before. When the name doesn't fit and they haven't handed you the explanation yet.
There is a difference between an object that looks mysterious and a process that stays mysterious. Most artists chase the first. You seem to be after the second. What does that change about how a day in the studio actually goes?
Making an object that wants to be mysterious is weak. It's representation. No use to me. Working mysteriously is keeping the field active while the sign stays withheld. I don't make objects. I work fields of tension.
I'm after free fall. No handholds. No moral message, no comfortable narrative, no brand at your back. Just you, the piece, and the 3 seconds before you go looking for something else to look at.
Industrial production and digital reproduction have saturated everything. They sell us the feeling of holding every answer, but it's only sensory daze. The mystery that's been lost was what made art kin to life. That bond broke. But something in us misses it. It shows in flashes. That fascinates me.
Installation View, Cindy Crawford. HOSTAGE 01, 2026
SOLO CSV; Movimiento 37, Madrid
Courtesy or SOLO Contemporary & The Artist
Anonymity usually means no face. Yours carries one everyone already knows. When you sign as Cindy Crawford, whose biography is being written?
Cindy Crawford doesn't impersonate. She reinforces. I don't renounce my biography, I put it under tension and it turns freer. It's anonymity through ultravisibility. High-voltage bait. A sign held hostage by its own packaging.
A bone battered in sulfur. So you'll bite. I'm sure you've felt it.
The name has a birth date: 2025. Something changed in your practice the day you began signing as Cindy Crawford. What?
My turn came. I stopped waiting. The name freed my hands. And it had built the ideal structure for the practice. I turned an old cinema in a remote village into the artist's paradise. I framed all of it as creative steroids. It crystallized completely with the adoption of the name. Being her, I understand what I want to do. I could have been Angustias LOL for how it vibrates, hooks, drives. But the weight of cultural expectation is hellish with Cindy. So I'm Cindy Crawford.
The biography names a precise figure: 27 years installing other people's work. What does 27 carry for you, if it carries anything?
It's chance. But if you want a reading: the 27 club. Only at 27 I didn't die. I was born. 27 years backstage. 27 years since the peak of Cindy Crawford. Expiry date and ignition point. A marker to pivot on along the timeline. My provenance.
Opening, Cindy Crawford. HOSTAGE 01, 2026
SOLO CSV; Movimiento 37, Madrid
Courtesy or SOLO Contemporary & The Artist
Inside Anish Kapoor's studio in London you spent seven full-time years making work that went out under someone else's name. When you returned to your own studio at the end of those days, what could your hand do that it couldn't before?
I learned where a piece is lost and where it is won. I shed a lot of noise. You watch pieces give way at the edge, in the tension, in the form that doesn't add up, and you stop telling yourself stories. I sharpened intention a great deal. I gained that: an internal fraud detector.
Few artists know what you know in the muscles: how weight behaves when it is lifted, suspended, set down. HOSTAGE 01 carries that knowledge up into authorship. What part of it refused to make the trip?
I'm a master rigger. That's the rank. After 27 years installing other people's work, the rank vouched for the authorship. A lot had to resist being translated.
What the muscles do doesn't translate clean into language. I translated the gesture. But not the weight. That loss is the engine. If I translated all of it, it would collapse. It would be load engineering, when it's really mastery of tensions.
The institutional text defines you as philosopher-craftsman and enlightened stowaway. Both figures place knowledge in the rear, behind a curtain. Now that the curtain is gone, do you still work from behind it, or has the position changed?
I place myself where the curtain has fallen and I work as a prism from that point. I don't explain. I invert and defragment the orders. Not many can stand there. Where it stings. Where it itches.
Your own words: tension, between weight and suspension, control and release. Every one of them describes a load rig and equally describes a mind. Where, inside the act of making, does one become the other?
It happens in the search parameters. If you search for objects, you make objects.If you search for moments, the thing stops being still. I work so the piece holds between being and making, between finished and suspended. Nothing fully settled. That's where the slippage I care about lives. As Bernhard wrote in Trastorno: nothing is entirely dead.
THE SOLO SPACE IS ONE HOSTAGE.
CINDY CRAWFORD iS ANOTHER.
EVERY PIECE IS A HOSTAGE.
YOUR MAGAZINE TOO.
YOU TOO.
HOSTAGE 01 WAS THE FIRST ACTIVE INCURSION
WITH THIS MISSION
Suspension is a momentary refusal of gravity. Every suspended object holds an argument with the floor. What do your works defend in that argument?
They defend that yielding is not losing. A suspended piece looks subjected to gravity.
But that submission builds the tension. It turns into a generator. This dynamic doesn't change when it leaves the studio. Try letting go yourself and see what happens. You see very strong passive energy.
A wall is supposed to be the dead part, it just keeps inside and outside apart. Yours doesn't behave like that, it's working. What does it want?
It's not a wall. It's a membrane. A skin without a body, a suggestion of casing. It defines the form, tells the story, breathes and screws you, because it divides. It's there and not there, and it keeps the enigma alive. As you rightly say, it's a crucial part of the system.
You speak of latent energy. The work looks paused, holding just before something breaks. From inside the piece, is anything actually waiting?
The tension is the work. And the event is happening. The fantasy that it can fall, give way, explode, is happening. There's a false hope in the static and the repetitive. With it the human believes he nears eternity and fools himself, numbs himself to dodge the fear. I prefer the changing, the singular, the tense. More realistic. Harder.
You wrote HOSTAGE 01 on the wall and explained it nowhere. Who is being held?
The SOLO space is one hostage. Cindy Crawford is another. Every piece is a hostage. Your magazine too. You too. HOSTAGE 01 was the first active incursion with this mission.
Installation View, Cindy Crawford. HOSTAGE 01, 2026
SOLO CSV; Movimiento 37, Madrid
Courtesy or SOLO Contemporary & The Artist
Ophiocordyceps is the fungus that takes over an insect's body and drives it upward before it kills it. You gave a sculpture that name.
In that arrangement, where are you?
I place myself between the fungus and the force that activates the cycle. I set in motion the device that hijacks the signs. I use that strategy. The object stays there, legible. Open to reinterpretation during its abduction. But its movement no longer belongs to it. It's been put back into another cycle, as valid as the original. Like the insect that climbs without knowing where to. Now it's something else, while still being what it was. I try to make this happen.
In any exhibition there are two bodies present: the body of the work and the body of the viewer. The invisible forces you describe pass through both. What reaches the viewer's body that nothing on a page can carry? I want you to feel it in the stomach, not the head. To strike an instinct you're issued with at birth, one that lives crouched. Cellular memory. You don't see it, but it passes right by you and wakes something in you. The work becomes a symbiont that inhabits you for a moment.
Artist's studio, 2026
Courtesy of the artist
The work sits between sculpture and performance, which means it isn't complete until someone walks in. What were you trying to finish inside that person?
I don't activate an emotion. I activate a state: being where the action hasn't closed. It's the productive discomfort of a backstage half built. You know you shouldn't be there. That's why you stop. You doubt whether you're in the way. But you stay inside. You think you have a one-off chance. There's something very raw and real there that connects all of us. No matter how you dress yourself up, we're all made of material that yields.
HOSTAGE 01 carries a number. The 01 is a promise made in public, in the title of your first solo exhibition. What is already held in 02, and what would it take for 01 to be released?
01 is not a promise.
02 is not the button to release anything.
Each number is a device for an environment X. If the environment changes, the next one comes in. I'm not trying to release the signs. I haven't abducted them either. The first number can serve for everything.
Does "Cindy Crawford" have an ending, and what would have to happen to reach it?
There are only two exits for Cindy Crawford: That a more useful sign appears to hold the tension. Or that the division between what is shown and what is not comes to an end. I don't think either will happen. So call me Cindy.
About Cindy Crawford
Cindy Crawford (Bilbao, 1974) is the pseudonym under which an art installer with 27 years in the trade signs his own work for the first time. He has lived in New York and London. He studied International Marketing. His professional path was built inside other people's workshops: five years at the Guggenheim Museum, four at the Royal Academy in London, four at Dietl International in New York, and thirteen years with Anish Kapoor, the last seven full-time fabricating work in his London studio. That long spell in the rear, made of large-format works and complex projects signed by other names, now underpins a language of his own: the language of someone who knows the real weight of things before he thinks them, and who translates that muscular literacy into authorship.
His independent practice crystallises in 2025. The name "Cindy Crawford" operates as a cultural glitch and a mask of anonymity, a device that charges the act of reading with a tension between expectation and error, placing mystery as an operative element and not a decorative one. His research concentrates on the materiality of tension: the contained body, the latent energy of suspended objects, the states of pressure and imbalance that sit between the sculptural and the performative. His works activate a reflection on the invisible forces that pass through matter and the body, and on the vibration of whatever resists being described. HOSTAGE 01, his first solo exhibition, is presented at SOLO CSV / Movimiento 37, Madrid.
About Movimiento 37
SOLO's international platform, dedicated to opening Madrid to global curatorial dialogue. Based at SOLO CSV, on Calle Ilustración 13, it operates as an exchange network connecting artists, galleries and institutions through shared exhibitions and residencies. Its logic is simple and uncommon: to give international artistic projects the chance to present their work in Madrid with curatorial accompaniment and communications support, without the usual frictions of the commercial model. The stated intention is to build community. The method is to facilitate encounters between professionals, to generate passages between scenes, and to let the Madrid context be crossed by practices that would otherwise never reach it.
The name says everything. Movement as a continuous gesture, not an isolated event. 37 as an address and as the figure that orders the venue's exhibition rhythm. The recent programme articulates this idea clearly: the choreographer of sonic mechanisms Koka Nikoladze, Shinuk Suh's investigation into control and consolation with The Engineering of Comfort, and now Cindy Crawford's HOSTAGE 01, which closes the sequence from the contained body and suspended energy. Three voices, three geographies, three languages that meet only because an infrastructure exists willing to cross them. Movimiento 37 functions, ultimately, as the most agile arm of the SOLO ecosystem: the part that keeps the project in conversation with the world.
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