Following meticulous and self-created methodologies, Gabriel de la Mora researches, collects, classifies, catalogs, and manipulates remarkably diverse materials. These materials are familiar, sourced from quotidian objects—his ongoing series The weight of thought, for example, repurposes leather and rubber shoe soles. de la Mora’s materials of choice are those often considered waste or residue: collected artifacts and antiques, obsolete mechanical and utilitarian objects, parts, corporeal matter, architectural scrap. Through these, the artist explores finitude and permanence, the passing of time, it’s bracketing, and the transformation of matter and energy alike. The formal outcome of these processes plays with pre-established notions of drawing, painting, and sculpture. Characterized by their visual potency, the resulting bodies of work complicate theoretical and historical art terms (the ready-made, the objet-trouvé, the monochrome, the peinture en plein air, among others). As such, they establish an ironic spin on the abstract and minimalist aesthetics and inquire about the ever-changing notion of painting as a phenomenon. Can painting originate itself with the passing of time and without any intervention from the artist’s hand? This apparent negation of painting and other ontological musings formulated by de la Mora’s oeuvre is extended to artistic practice at large: When is an artwork born and when does it reach its conclusion? What is the role of the artist within the creative act? Coupled with equally methodical and strict processes, Gabriel de la Mora has constituted a practice in which the role of the artist is not to create nor to destroy, but to transform.
Gabriel de la Mora was born on September 23, 1968 in Mexico City, where he lives and works. He earned an MFA in Painting (2001-03) from Pratt Institute, NY and a BFA in Architecture (1987-91) from Universidad Anáhuac del Norte, Mexico City. He has been a Fulbright García-Robles grant recipient, a grantee from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, and a member of the National System of Creators-FONCA (2013-15), Mexico.
His work is part of public and private collections in Mexico and abroad, among them: Fundación/Colección JUMEX, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Internacional Rufino Tamayo, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo-MUAC, and Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico; Museum of Contemporary Art-MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; El Museo del Barrio, NYC, NY; Albright-Knox, Buffalo, NY; Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Compostela; Colección Banco de la República and Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Bogotá; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano-MALBA, Buenos Aires.
He is represented by PROYECTOSMONCLOVA (Mexico City), Timothy Taylor (London), Sicardi Ayers Bacino (Houston) and PERROTIN (Paris, New York, Seoul, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Hong Kong).
PROYECTOS MONCLOVA
PSICOTROPICAL
Gabriel de la Mora
02.02.2022 – 05.03.2022
For the first time in Mexico, Gabriel de la Mora presents two new series of works: Lepidóptera and
Ígnea. For the first of the two series, De la Mora uses fragments of butterfly wings to generate
mosaics based on the repetition of patterns with differences that are resolved in a uniformity that
goes from monochrome to abstraction, sometimes geometric, sometimes fractal, resulting in the
image. The wings are acquired from butterfly farms in Peru, Indonesia, and Madagascar, where
specimens have fulfilled their function and died due to natural causes, allowing the artist to
transform their apparent end into the beginning of something else. De la Mora manages to isolate
fragments as compositional elements to transform images into discourse.
The second series titled Ígnea, created with fragmented sheets of stone materials, such as
obsidian and andesite, converses in a very interesting way with the butterfly wings. First, the color
contrast: its monochromatic tones are a counterpoint to the colorful iridescence of the wings, in
addition to the material condition -the weight of the stone compared to the lightness of the wingsand finally, the immanent temporalities -the stone has fewer modifications with the passage of
time while the wings require a more delicate conservation treatment. Despite the contrasting
difference between these materials, both working groups straddle the line between fragility and
the eternal.
The Mexican artist’s interest in working with materials that contain DNA has been a constant in his
practice, from pieces made with human hair, eggshells, turkey feathers, and most recently,
butterfly wings. Each wing fragment contains a genetic code, defined by time and its natural
environment, which draws their identity and allows them to know, among many things, to migrate
and define their territory, as mentioned by the Brazilian curator Marcello Dantas, in the gallery text
that accompanies the exhibition. For De la Mora, the use of these components is a way of
approaching painting and drawing; on this occasion, it is the colors and patterns of nature that
have the most important role in the creation of these pieces.
The title of the exhibition, PSICOTROPICAL, arises from the profound encounter between the viewer
and the work. In addition to the fact that many of the species of butterflies used by the artist are
PROYECTOS MONCLOVA
from the tropics, each piece, being a universe in itself, generates a visual effect of such great
intensity that it awakens in us endless questions that move us and leave us thinking.
Gabriel de la Mora (1968, Mexico City) lives and works in Mexico City. His most recent individual
exhibitions include Lepidoptera, Perrotin, New York; El poeta es el autor que desaparece, Francisco
Goitia Museum, Zacatecas; Originalmentefalso, National Museum of Art (MUNAL) and ÉCHO,
Perrotin, Paris, among others. His work has recently been included in group exhibitions such as
Temperatura ambiente: Jumex Collection, Jumex Museum; CIEN DEL MUAC, Museum of
Contemporary Art (MUAC), and El tiempo en las cosas, Amparo Museum, Puebla. His work is part of
public and private collections in Mexico and abroad, among them: JUMEX Foundation/Collection,
Rufino Tamayo International Museum Contemporary Art, Carrillo Gil Art Museum, University Museum
of Contemporary Art -MUAC and the Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City; Museum of Contemporary
Art-MOCA, Los Angeles, California; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; El Museo del Barrio,
NYC, New York; Perez Art Museum, Miami, Florida; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; Museum
of Latin American Art-MALBA, Buenos Aires, among others. He is represented by PROYECTOS
MONCLOVA, Timothy Taylor, Sicardi Ayers Bacino and PERROTIN
VISITA AL ESTUDIO: GABRIEL DE LA MORA
25.ENE.2022 | 7PM Actividad en línea
Conoce los procesos de producción de obra de los artistas contemporáneos y los temas relacionados con su práctica en estas visitas que se llevarán a cabo vía Zoom cada mes.
En enero visitaremos el estudio del artista Gabriel de la Mora con motivo de la exposición Colección Jumex: Temperatura ambiente. Platicaremos sobre sus intereses como artista, sus estrategias de investigación, los diversos procesos que implica realizar una obra, así como sus problemáticas. Al final de la sesión, habrá un tiempo de preguntas y respuestas que permitirá un intercambio de ideas más abierto entre los participantes y el artista.
Actividad gratuita con registro previo
Dirigido a todo público
Cupo limitado a 20 personas
Registro Amigos del Museo Jumex
membresias@fundacionjumex.org
Visita al estudio: Gabriel de la Mora – Museo Jumex
|
Gracie DeVito
Gabriel de la Mora
Merlin James
January 19- March 4, 2022
Gallery Hours:
Monday, Tuesday by appointment
Wednesday-Friday 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Saturday 12-5 p.m.
This publication celebrates the last days of the Gabriel de la Mora: LEPIDOPTERA exhibition in Perrotin New York that can be visited until December 23, 2021 and exclusively announces my next solo exhibition at Proyectos Monclova in Mexico City 02.02.2022.
https://www.proyectosmonclova.com/
James Benjamin Franklin, Eduardo Terrazas, Edgar Orlaineta, Ángela Gurría, Gabriel de la Mora, Fernando García Ponce, Tercerunquinto, Martín Soto Climent, Hilda Palafox
Preview VIP
30.11.2021 – 01.12.2021
02.12.2021 – 04.12.2021
Miami Beach Convention Center
Takashi Murakami, Daniel Arsham, Maurizio Cattelan, Cristina BanBan, Kathia St. Hilaire, Tavares Strachan, Jason Boyd Kinsella, Iván Argote, Mathilde Denize, Jens Fänge, Bernard Frize, Thilo Heinzmann, John Henderson, Leslie Hewitt, JR, Izumi Kato, Gabriel de la Mora, Danielle Orchard, Jean Michel Othoniel, GaHee Park, Paola Pivi, Gabriel Rico, Josh Sperling, Hans Hartung, Georges Mathieu, Jesús Rafael Soto.
Curated by Gregor Hildebrandt
Johannes Albers, Olivia Berckemeyer, Matthias Bitzer, Lynda Benglis, John Bock, Björn Dahlem, Amélie Esterházy, Andi Fischer, Bernard Frize, Gabriel de la Mora, Axel Geis, Raimund Girke, Gregor Hildebrandt, Leiko Ikemura, Caro Jost, Manuel Kirsch, Jürgen Krause, Alicja Kwade, Florian Meisenberg, Isa Melsheimer, Olaf Metzel, Gerold Miller, Manfred Pernice, Gerd Rohling, Anselm Reyle, Robert Ryman, Michael Sailstorfer, Karin Sander, Erik Schmidt, Chris Succo, Milen Till, John Torreano, Jorinde Voigt, Wiebke Maria Wachmann, Tomas Zipp.
Opening 11.25.2021 / 5 PM
Avlskarl Gallery
Bredgade 28 1260 Copenhagen K, Phone: +45 24 67 97 24, art@avlskarl.com
Gregor Hildebrandt on “Schnee fällt hinterm Berge” “Morten asked if I would be interested in creating a show in his gallery. I was really looking forward to doing this kind of group show with works that are interesting for me. The idea comes from a private collection in my home that I am running together with my partner. There is this one room, where we also sleep, where we have mostly white works. It started by accident with some paper pieces by Jürgen Krause and Jorinde Voigt. Then, we found out the pieces were mostly white, and I started to collect more white works, like ones by Gabriel de la Mora and a paper piece by Robert Berry. This was the starting point of the show, to create a group show with all white pieces.”
SOUTH SOUTH’s inaugural Curatorial Projects titled I draw, therefore I think is curated by artist and curator Jitish Kallat. This drawing project is prompted by Charles Darwin’s 1837 sketch ‘Tree of Life’ in which he scribbled down a framework for his speculations in his first “transmutation notebook”.
60 Artists
28 Galleries
29 Countries
One exhibition. Two ways to view.
I draw, therefore I think can be viewed as an artwork-led viewing room and an interactive Miro board produced in collaboration with the Open Window Institute, allowing for multiple forms of engagement throughout the project’s duration. On the Miro board your name and cursor will be visible on screen and you will be able to communicate and collaborate with others on the board.
https://south-south.art/ovr_artwork/gabriel-de-la-mora-2/
Perrotin is pleased to present The Blues, an online exhibition bringing together 10 works, both new and historic, that pay homage to blue as an enduring symbol of the sublime.
Blue has a storied history — Vermeer sunk his family into debt as a result of his obsession with the prized pigment, and Michelangelo left his paintings unfinished when he couldn’t gather enough funds to acquire his desired blue. Yves Klein, however, released a thousand and one helium-filled blue balloons into the sky above Paris.
Today, we are pleased to present works by Gabriel De La Mora, Hans Hartung, John Henderson, Yves Klein, Julio Le Parc, Georges Mathieu, Shin Murata, Gregor Hildebrandt, Jean-Michel Othoniel and Xavier Veilhan that meditate on the eternal lure of blue.
NOVEMBER 3 – DECEMBER 23, 2021
https://leaflet.perrotin.com/view/173/lepidoptera
The Lepidoptera Demon
Butterflies are known for their delicacy and discreet charm, qualities enhanced through a capacity to keep unnoticed: It is astounding how little an ordinary person notices butterflies.[1]
Despite their colorful wings, which fast and concise movements perhaps would only allow us to get a glimpse on the elaborate patterns, designs, and chromatic combinations that some species display. Like other organisms, butterflies are prone to mimicry. They can resemble a flower, a tree or look like fallen leaves in the northern autumn or in the tropical rain forest. Their unassumed beauty and familiarity can transform a solitary spot in a forest into a site for spiritual introspection and delight. It is not accidental that the angel of death was represented by the Gnostics as a winged foot stepping on a butterfly. Psyche, the Greek goddess represented through butterfly wings, prompted psychoanalysis’ interpretation of lepidoptera as symbols of resurgence.[2] Butterflies also dwell on Mesoamerican iconography, in particular the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, which considered them as the fleeting souls of deceased warriors.
Beyond the realms of natural sciences and entomology, lengthy literature on lepidoptera proves their aesthetic allure and symbolic potency as the paradoxical insects with wings that they are. From opera to social sculpture, butterflies inspired metaphoric interpretations that transcend the binary model of gender and sexuality as well as the polarities of life and death.[3] Martin Johnson Heade represented a Blue Morpho type in perhaps one of the most arresting paintings ever made of a living butterfly in which two of its wings, expose a singular iridescence while the other ones, slightly bent towards the left, were depicted in black as if they belong to the afterlife. The background shows a fantastic landscape that leads us to the equinoctial regions so keen to the nineteenth century art travelers influenced by Alexander von Humboldt.[4] But as Vladimir Nabokov observed, butterflies are largely unnoticed by people. Nabokov, who suffered a severe pneumonia at a very young age, lost his “monstrous gift of numbers that had made me a child prodigy during a few months (today I cannot multiply 13 by 17 without a pencil and paper; I can add them up, though, in a trice, the teeth of the three fitting in neatly); but the butterflies survived (…)” According to the writer, a year later he “gained absolute control over the European lepidoptera as known to Hoffmann.”[5]
Intriguingly, artist Gabriel de la Mora showed an unusual disposition to play with language at a very young age. Comparable to Nabokov’s gift of numbers and his skills to solve complicated mathematical operations, which the Russian American writer characterized rather as “a demon”, de la Mora can read straightforwardly a sentence backwards and disorganize a word to compose an instant riddle. Dyslexia prompted him to perceive words as images, fragments in magnified dimensions: “cuando no entiendes la información que tienes enfrente o que escuchas, inmediatamente se convierten en imágenes, en fragmentos, en ruido, en sonidos y en un sinfín de cosas que no tienen nada que ver con la realidad de los contenidos o las cosas (…) Veo las letras y los números de una forma diferente, me fascinan ambos y siempre he visto a las letras, los números, las palabras y las matemáticas de una forma diferente.” [6]
De la Mora’s early works after graduating from the Pratt Institute were under the spell of language as a problem to be solved through visual forms and transitional objects. More recently, he dedicated his artistic investigation to renovate the language of modernist abstraction using bodily elements such as human hair for his Capilares non-representational drawings, and egg shelves, feathers, and butterfly wings to compose geometric, monochromatic, or hard-edge paintings.[7]
Gabriel de la Mora’s new Lepidoptera series composed of thirty-three works made of eight different species of butterflies, seem to complete a cycle of difference in which the artist merged modernist lessons by Joseph Albers with his own propensity to isolate fragments as compositional elements for transforming images into a scribbled discourse. If the Mexica mythologies added a cultural layer to De la Mora’s formal endeavor of bringing the opalescence of butterflies to abstract painting, their unnoticed beauty appealed as a language in which color always hides the nature of the element that you see. Mimicry is their “demon” or to put it in words by Roger Caillois: “it is not the presence of the elements what is perplexing and decisive, it is their mutual organization, their reciprocal topography.”[8]
Gabriela Rangel
Independent writer and curator based in Brooklyn
[1] Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited. Vintage International, New York, 1989.
[2] J.E Cirlot, Diccionario de símbolos. Editorial Siruela, Madrid, 2011. p. 306-307
[3] It’s been stated that the Parangoles (wearable paintings) by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica were influenced by his collaboration as a research assistant to his father’s work as a distinguished entomologist. The young Oiticica classified specimens and performed other tasks.
[4] Blue Morpho Butterfly (1863-64), Christal Bridges Museum Collection.
[5] Op. Cit. 123
[6] Interview with the author. August 2021.
[7] De la Mora began using human hair in figurative drawings made in 2005. The works created a narrative with children. See: Sergio Rodríguez Blanco, Alegorías Capilares. Trilce Ediciones Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Instituto de Bellas Artes, Monterrey, México. 2011.
[8] Caillois, Roger, and John Shepley. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” October 31 (1984): 17–32. https://doi.org/10.2307/778354.
www.perrotin.com/exhibitions/gabriel_de_la_mora_-lepidoptera/7625
https://leaflet.perrotin.com/view/173/lepidoptera
The Lepidoptera Demon
Butterflies are known for their delicacy and discreet charm, qualities enhanced through a capacity to keep unnoticed: It is astounding how little an ordinary person notices butterflies.[1]
Despite their colorful wings, which fast and concise movements perhaps would only allow us to get a glimpse on the elaborate patterns, designs, and chromatic combinations that some species display. Like other organisms, butterflies are prone to mimicry. They can resemble a flower, a tree or look like fallen leaves in the northern autumn or in the tropical rain forest. Their unassumed beauty and familiarity can transform a solitary spot in a forest into a site for spiritual introspection and delight. It is not accidental that the angel of death was represented by the Gnostics as a winged foot stepping on a butterfly. Psyche, the Greek goddess represented through butterfly wings, prompted psychoanalysis’ interpretation of lepidoptera as symbols of resurgence.[2] Butterflies also dwell on Mesoamerican iconography, in particular the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, which considered them as the fleeting souls of deceased warriors.
Beyond the realms of natural sciences and entomology, lengthy literature on lepidoptera proves their aesthetic allure and symbolic potency as the paradoxical insects with wings that they are. From opera to social sculpture, butterflies inspired metaphoric interpretations that transcend the binary model of gender and sexuality as well as the polarities of life and death.[3] Martin Johnson Heade represented a Blue Morpho type in perhaps one of the most arresting paintings ever made of a living butterfly in which two of its wings, expose a singular iridescence while the other ones, slightly bent towards the left, were depicted in black as if they belong to the afterlife. The background shows a fantastic landscape that leads us to the equinoctial regions so keen to the nineteenth century art travelers influenced by Alexander von Humboldt.[4] But as Vladimir Nabokov observed, butterflies are largely unnoticed by people. Nabokov, who suffered a severe pneumonia at a very young age, lost his “monstrous gift of numbers that had made me a child prodigy during a few months (today I cannot multiply 13 by 17 without a pencil and paper; I can add them up, though, in a trice, the teeth of the three fitting in neatly); but the butterflies survived (…)” According to the writer, a year later he “gained absolute control over the European lepidoptera as known to Hoffmann.”[5]
Intriguingly, artist Gabriel de la Mora showed an unusual disposition to play with language at a very young age. Comparable to Nabokov’s gift of numbers and his skills to solve complicated mathematical operations, which the Russian American writer characterized rather as “a demon”, de la Mora can read straightforwardly a sentence backwards and disorganize a word to compose an instant riddle. Dyslexia prompted him to perceive words as images, fragments in magnified dimensions: “cuando no entiendes la información que tienes enfrente o que escuchas, inmediatamente se convierten en imágenes, en fragmentos, en ruido, en sonidos y en un sinfín de cosas que no tienen nada que ver con la realidad de los contenidos o las cosas (…) Veo las letras y los números de una forma diferente, me fascinan ambos y siempre he visto a las letras, los números, las palabras y las matemáticas de una forma diferente.” [1]
De la Mora’s early works after graduating from the Pratt Institute were under the spell of language as a problem to be solved through visual forms and transitional objects. More recently, he dedicated his artistic investigation to renovate the language of modernist abstraction using bodily elements such as human hair for his Capilares non-representational drawings, and egg shelves, feathers, and butterfly wings to compose geometric, monochromatic, or hard-edge paintings.[2]
Gabriel de la Mora’s new Lepidoptera series composed of thirty-three works made of eight different species of butterflies, seem to complete a cycle of difference in which the artist merged modernist lessons by Joseph Albers with his own propensity to isolate fragments as compositional elements for transforming images into a scribbled discourse. If the Mexica mythologies added a cultural layer to De la Mora’s formal endeavor of bringing the opalescence of butterflies to abstract painting, their unnoticed beauty appealed as a language in which color always hides the nature of the element that you see. Mimicry is their “demon” or to put it in words by Roger Caillois: “it is not the presence of the elements what is perplexing and decisive, it is their mutual organization, their reciprocal topography.”[3]
Gabriela Rangel
Independent writer and curator based in Brooklyn
https://www.perrotin.com/exhibitions/gabriel_de_la_mora_-lepidoptera/7625
https://leaflet.perrotin.com/view/173/lepidoptera
[1] Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory. An Autobiography Revisited. Vintage International, New York, 1989
[2] J.E Cirlot, Diccionario de símbolos. Editorial Siruela, Madrid, 2011. p. 306-307
[3] It’s been stated that the Parangoles (wearable paintings) by Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica were influenced by his collaboration as a research assistant to his father’s work as a distinguished entomologist. The young Oiticica classified specimens and performed other tasks.
[4] Blue Morpho Butterfly (1863-64), Christal Bridges Museum Collection.
[5] Op. Cit. 123
[6] Interview with the author. August 2021.
[7] De la Mora began using human hair in figurative drawings made in 2005. The works created a narrative with children. See: Sergio Rodríguez Blanco, Alegorías Capilares. Trilce Ediciones Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Instituto de Bellas Artes, Monterrey, México. 2011.
[8] Caillois, Roger, and John Shepley. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” October 31 (1984): 17–32. https://doi.org/10.2307/778354.
I draw these letters
as the day draws its images
and blows over them and does not return
Writing, Octavio Paz
The poet is a creator who disappears behind his work, says Octavio Paz. This condition is necessary for the reader to complete the poem, since the images can only be freely interpreted when they have been separated from their author. Paz ponders with Heraclitus that it is the logos itself that is manifested in the poem and, through its matter, the individual subjectivity of the author is not expressed, but the voice of all humanity. Similarly, in the works that comprise the series The Sense of Possibility, by Gabriel de la Mora, the artist gives place to nature, which literally acts on the canvases.
These pieces were conceived as a response to the environmental deterioration caused by our industrial and extractive activities. During a visit to Monterrey in September 2015, De la Mora documented the gradual deterioration of Cerro de las Mitras, where there are deposits of raw materials for the manufacture of cement. The series consist of landscapes and seascapes acquired in antique and flea markets – decorative pieces, by forgotten or unknown authors, perhaps as a result of quasi-industrial production lines – that were exposed to the elements for different periods of time.
The process reverses the meaning of outdoor painting: that idyllic figure of the painter in the field that popular culture tends to regard as the ultimate attempt to capture the essence of the landscape. Here nature is imposed on the pieces: the wind, the sun, the humidity, hailstones and changes in temperature act on the pieces to transform them. They have ceased to be a representation of the landscape to become an indication of the presence of nature and its effects. In them the tension is manifested between the practice of painting with its claim to eternity –the image that fixes the moment to stop time, the technique that has developed the materials that try to prevent the decay of the pictorial object– and the deterioration caused over time, a slow, almost imperceptible erosion that has been halted and stabilized again.
The pictorial image is an instant charged with subjectivity that De la Mora turns into a device at service of memory, understood according to the philosopher Manuel Cruz1, as a human glance about the world, as an instrument to see reality from another perspective. However, the procedure that the artist has used causes a double negative, each of these pieces is the representation of a landscape that is no longer there, and at the same time, it is a representation that disappears: it is the erased memory of an absence indicating that the memory is always on the verge of oblivion.
https://es-la.facebook.com/museogoitia
Curator:Abraham Villavicencio.
http://www.munal.mx/en/exposicion/originalmentefalso
http://www.munal.mx
Timothy Taylor is delighted to present Neornithes, a new body of work by Gabriel de la Mora. Referring to the taxonomic description for modern birds, Neornithes represents the culmination of de la Mora’s investigations into the role of biological material as both medium and metaphor.
https://www.timothytaylor.com/exhibitions/gabriel-de-la-mora-neornithes/
Perrotin presents Gabriel de la Mora’s first exhibition at our Paris location. De la Mora is a conceptual artist based in Mexico, whose work explores alternative modes of image-making. He works in a diverse range of materials including eggshells, sound screens, human hair, and found objects. The artist’s serial work constitutes a structure of mirror images, echoes, and repetitions.
https://www.perrotin.com/exhibitions/gabriel_de_la_mora_-echo/7867
https://www.perrotin.com/
The exhibition by Gabriel de la Mora (Mexico City, 1968) and Sofie Muller (Ghent, 1974) explores the passage of time and its impact on nature and human beings. The exhibition is configured as a dialogue between Muller’s sculptures and Gabriel De la Mora’s paintings, where the concepts of deconstruction and decadence coexist. Gabriel de la Mora presents a series of found landscapes that were made with oil or acrylic between 1950 and 1990 in Mexico. De la Mora exposes these paintings to the elements for a certain period so that the sun, changes in temperature, acid rain, and other climatic phenomena transform or disappear —partially or completely— the original landscape they represented. With this process in which time and nature take on an important role, de la Mora makes an analogy to the damage caused by a man on the landscape; for this purpose, he mentions: “just as man destroys nature, nature will destroy the representation of nature made by man and will return it to nature”. The title of each piece indicates the days when these paintings were exhibited, which mainly represented mountains or views in which lakes, rivers, and oceans appeared, spaces that suffer the effects of climate change and pollution caused mostly by humans. Sofie Muller, for her part, presents pieces made with alabaster – wounded, cracked and scarred heads – that reflect the deterioration of the human body over time as a consequence of a life defined by struggle, manipulation, personal experience, and the wounds. These pieces that are fragile, poetic, and brutal at the same time are placed on the floor, gently laid on a worn pillow, or suspended on the walls. The sculptures appeal to the study carried out by the artist on the manipulation of the human body and the concept of “manageable human”; Furthermore, Muller exhibits a series of drawings made with blood on alabaster that appeal to the fragility of the human body through the use of natural and organic materials. The overall result is determined by the age of the material used.
http://proyectosmonclova.com/exposicion/pentimento/
http://proyectosmonclova.com/
Starting April 25, you have a new appointment with Mexican contemporary art at Casa de México. We inaugurated the exhibition Inevidencias, by Gabriel de la Mora.
This exhibition brings together works from three different series by the Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora. Being a consequence of each other, these series allow observing the development of the work of an artist who has sought to explore painting, drawing, and sculpture from a radical subversion of the bases and procedures of these disciplines.
At the same time, the exhibition allows us to get closer and know the work processes that the artist performs in his study of Mexico City, characterized by a meticulous and obsessive exploration of the infinite possibilities that iterations and repetitions allow.
https://www.casademexico.es/detalle-evento/5cac9cb441570e76f00fb467
Perrotin New York is proud to host Gabriel de la Mora’s first exhibition with the gallery. The unique methods and materials de la Mora uses—feathers, eggshells, and human hair, in this case—stem from the artist’s decision to “quit painting” in 2004. The result has been an exploration of alternative modes of image-making, wherein seemingly minimal and often monochrome-looking surfaces belie great technical complexity, conceptual rigor, and embedded information.
https://www.perrotin.com/exhibitions/gabriel_de_la_mora_-tntr-aa/6618
www.perrotin.com
This exhibition is organized by the Pinacoteca of the University of Colima to show the works of Gabriel de la Mora that are part of the Collection of the University of Colima and the Secretary of Culture of the State of Colima.
Gabriel de la Mora: Crystals of Inevidence / Cristales de Inevidencia
September 7 – October 19, 2017
Sicardi Gallery
