This is the first comprehensive review in Mexico City of one of the most internationally significant contemporary Mexican artists. The exhibition, comprised of over 80 works produced from the 1990s to the present, situates Damián Ortega’s work within a crucial period of Mexico’s recent history, marked by the country’s economic opening to foreign investment and the rise of industrial manufacturing. The installations, sculptures, photographs, films, and textiles presented in the exhibition reflect the artist’s constant concern with socio-economic and political changes within the globalized context.

The exhibition, first presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey (MARCO) in 2023, is curated by José Esparza, current executive director and chief curator of the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York.

It is structured in a non-chronological journey through three curatorial axes: Harvest, Assemble, and Collapse, which favor criteria of both plastic and conceptual nature, maintaining skepticism towards the idea of progress in Mexico.

harvest

This thematic axis reflects on foreign investment and the increase in industrial processes, leading to the modification of local production techniques. It highlights the complex work required for corn cultivation by capturing its cultural meanings and warning about the risks associated with the use of genetically modified organisms. Tired Pickaxe and Classified Corn are two crucial pieces for understanding the artist's impulses and obsessions with the social and material culture of labor.

assemblage

In Ortega's work, rudimentary tools used to prepare the fields and harvest crops can be seen as analogous to the birth of a new language. By altering these readymade objects, these simple instruments that Ortega worked with in his early sculptural work take on a life of their own.

collapse

The artist addresses the threat of environmental disasters resulting from precarious labor conditions and the indiscriminate extraction of natural resources, creating dystopian scenarios that serve as a warning of the destructive forces of the globalized production system.

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More about Damián Ortega