Gabriel de la Mora

Gabriel de la Mora (1968, Mexico City) lives and works in Mexico City. De la Mora focuses his artistic practice on the use and reuse of discarded or obsolete objects that seem to have completed their utilitarian life. More interested in the deconstruction and fragmentation of an object or material over time, De la Mora rejects the notion of the artist as a virtuous and focuses on reconstruction based on practices based on the passage of time and processes, echoing the Ready-made concept. In an obsessive process of collecting and cataloging discarded objects -old radios, shoe soles, microscope slides, egg shells, doors, and daguerreotypes- De la Mora creates new geometrical assemblages by rearranging their fragments. Interested in the juxtaposition of making the ephemeral reappear in a new light, De la Mora gives visibility to the aura of the object, compressing its immateriality, which once removed from its previous narrative and arranged in a context of exhibition, seems in turn to be watching us.

PROYECTOS MONCLOVA

For the first iteration of SOUTH SOUTH, PROYECTOS MONCLOVA is presenting a selection of works by five artists, including: Gabriel de la Mora, Néstor Jiménez, Edgar Orlaineta, Michael Sailstorfer and Anna Virnich. All five artists, while producing widely different work, focus their practice on the idea and physicality of process. The geometric works of Gabriel de la Mora are multifaceted in their subject and materiality. Through his obsessive practice of accumulating and fragmenting pigmented feathers, the artist combines his meticulous craftsmanship with conceptual investigations that result in evocative and abstract configurations. Similarly, Jiménez collects construction materials from houses and projects found in the outskirts of Mexico City as a way of examining the relationship between the processes of destruction, construction, distortion and propagation of Marxist-Leninist thought within social structures in the outskirts of Mexico City. By incorporating the construction materials that are widely used among these low-income areas, the result is a comprehensive pictorial group of work that also absorbs the architectural elements that were essential to these political movements. Edgar Orlaineta’s hand carved wooden wall sculptural works also reveal a knowledge and an intimate contact with the manual process, where what takes precedence over figure and ground is the sensuous matter that transforms intuition into a language. Also working with sculptural wall works is Michael Sailstorfer whose ‘masks’ are sand-cast in aluminum, bronze or iron from quickly drafted cardboard figures in a process that preserves the textures of the humble materials. Lastly, PROYECTOS MONCLOVA presents two tableaus by Anna Virnich. Virnich’s artistic practice focuses on textile-based works, incorporating and layering found fabrics as well as new materials, which the artist stretches on wooden frames thus creating organic and almost painterly compositions that oscillate between transparency and density, foreground and background, agility and standstill. Virnich’s gesture of stretching creates a perceptible tension between the elements: the roughness of a leather-cut-out meets the delicacy of sewn silk.