Damián Ortega

Ikon presents Damián Ortega (born Mexico, 1967, lives and works in Mexico City and Berlin), one of the most significant artists to have emerged from Mexico in recent years. Ortega produces works that engage with matter, the condition of sculpture, geo-political and social concerns, through the manipulation of common, close at hand materials. He transforms them through sculptural and conceptual processes that, though applied with quasi-scientific rigour, result in deeply poetic, characteristically humourous works.

Ortega will make new work inspired by Ikon Eastside’s vast industrial space. On a research visit to Eastside - a city centre district whose industrial past still lingers despite the decline of manufacturing firms that are rapidly giving way to massive new residential developments - Ortega seized upon huge rolls of thin copper sheeting that were processed in factories there prior to their recent closure. Interested in the physical properties of the material – its flexibility, ability to hold its form, rich colour and propensity to tarnish dramatically – as well as copper’s associations, as a symbol of energy, a conductor of power and heat, Ortega plans to create a trilogy of exploded views from this single rolled form. Extended upwards into a five metre high tower, uncoiled and collapsed sideways to suggest an undulating skyline or unwound across space in a labyrinthine structure, these monumental works fuse the city’s industrial past with its aspiration for the future, suggesting constant evolution and change. The work will itself submit to the process of decay during the run of the exhibition, showing the relentless, entropic process of time as the copper discolours.

Ortega achieved international recognition following the inclusion of his work Cosmic Thing, in Gabriel Orozco’s exhibition, The Everyday Altered, at La Biennale di Venezia 2003. Typical of his practice, it consists of a Volkswagen Beetle, suspended piece by piece from the ceiling to reveal a complex system in which each part, though separate and distinct, contributes to the functioning of a greater collective whole.

Supported by the Henry Moore Foundation and Arte Contemporaneo Omnilife.

Damian Ortega