Damián Ortega
9 July – 23 October 2016
The Fruitmarket Gallery’s summer exhibition is a major exhibition of new work by Mexican artist Damián Ortega.
Born in 1967 in Mexico City, Damián Ortega is one of the most prominent artists of the new Mexican generation. His work prioritises action over object, seeking to call attention to the dynamism of the world around us, and the hidden poetry in the everyday.
For The Fruitmarket Gallery’s summer exhibition, Ortega will make new sculptures focusing on how the forces of nature – wind, water, earth and fire – act on the earth both independently of and in relationship to humankind.
The works in the exhibition are predominantly made from clay, the most elemental of materials. Ortega uses clay to form waves and sculpt icebergs and to track the eroding power of a river on a sequence of plains made from brick. These river erosion pieces show us the sculptural agency of water and also of mankind: they speak of how the landscape has shaped itself but also, made from brick, of how mankind’s attempts to harness the land to our own purpose have played a part in the state of the world now.
A major new sculpture presents a bewildering array of tools, made from seemingly unfired clay and laid out on tables as if they had just been unearthed in an archaeological dig. The tools move from the most ‘primitive’ to the most ‘sophisticated’, from representations of flint arrowheads to clay facsimiles of mobile phones in a work that is both a celebration of the skill that sets us apart from other animals and a visual history of our exploitation of the natural world.
Ortega shows us clay as matter, as energy, as power. His is a restless imagination and the exhibition turns The Fruitmarket Gallery into an arena for the investigation of a world in flux.
Press view
Friday 8 July, 11.30am.
Artist’s Talk
Friday 8 July, 5–6pm.
Damián Ortega In conversation with The Fruitmarket Gallery’s Director Fiona Bradley.
Exhibition Preview
Friday 8 July, 6–8pm.
Exhibition sponsored by Baillie Gifford
Exhibition supported by the Embassy of Mexico in the United Kingdom
and AMEXCID (Mexican Agency for International Development Cooperation)
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