Sergio Prego

New York, NY

Sergio Prego is a Basque artist, part of the experimental 1990s Arteleku project in San Sebastián, and is based in Brooklyn. His mainly sculptural practice embraces a sensitive approach to materials and technical strategies while maintaining the presence of the hand of the artist. Among his most celebrated projects are Primer Proforma at the MUSAC in León (2010) together with the artists Txomin Badiola and Jon Mikel Euba; the experimental pedagogical project Kalostra (2015) in San Sebastián; the Spanish Pavilion of the International Architecture Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2019) with the artist Itziar Okariz; Graham Foundation Fellowship exhibition, Poured Architecture: Sergio Prego on Miguel Fisac (2020); and Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao (2022). His work is included in the collections of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao; Museo Guggenheim, Bilbao; and MACBA, Barcelona.

2025 Biennial Project

Project Overview

Get out of the way

This presentation restages Get out of the way, an inflatable sculpture by Sergio Prego first shown in Poured Architecture (2020). Known for his boundary-breaking practice at the intersection of art, design, and architecture, Prego uses inflatables to explore how air, bodies, and built space interact. The work is made from flat polyethylene sheets folded into tubes and constrained by aluminum elements, forming a chain of modular tetrahedrons. Light and hollow, it expands to occupy space and then recedes, reshaping the viewer’s movement and perception. In doing so, it destabilizes the conventional ways architecture frames circulation and visibility. Referencing the legacy of 1960s inflatable architecture—by Ant Farm, Archigram, Buckminster Fuller, and Frei Otto—Prego extends this countercultural lineage into the present. Get out of the way highlights his interest in inflatables as speculative architectures: adaptable, porous, and animated by air, they transform space through impermanence and tension.

Venue

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Graham Foundation

Address

4 W. Burton Pl., Chicago, IL 60610

Neighborhood

Gold Coast

Description

Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. The Graham realizes this vision through making project-based grants to individuals and organizations and producing exhibitions, events, and publications.

Graham Foundation, Madlener House (exterior) with "Hard Sun Interstate," Sam Chermayeff Office and Hard Sun, 2025. Photo by Bob. (Robert Heishman)
Chicago Architecture Biennial