Damián Ortegagorilla building, 2019

cardboard, styrofoam, kraft paper, pine wood, balsa wood and cement bags "habitat 67" moshe safdie, montreal, canada

77.56 x 68.9 x 35.43 in

About the artist

deconstructs familiar objects and processes with a witty sense of humor, altering their functions and transforming them into novel experiences and scenarios. His work plays with a scale that ranges from the molecular to the cosmic. As the art critic Guy Brett says, Ortega combines the cosmic with the accidental, applying the concepts of physics to human interactions where chaos, accidents, and instability produce a system of relations in flux. By inverting and dissecting, reconfiguring and zooming in, he explores the tension that underlies every object and its own infinite world. The result of his inquiries reveals the interdependence of many different components: either within a complex engineered machine or a social system. Ortega outlines the concepts of his projects through drawing, and then they shift into sculpture, installation, performance, film, and photography. For Ortega, the work of art is always an action: an event. His experiments inhabit a space where possibility and the everyday converge to activate a transcendent new way of looking at simple objects and routine interactions. Ortega began his career as a political cartoonist and participated in Gabriel Orozco’s workshop, Taller de los viernes, from 1987 to 1992. In 2005, he was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize, and in 2007, he was nominated for the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst. In 2014, he received the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution, and in 2006, he particapted in an artist residency at Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) in Berlin. One of Ortega’s most important projects is Alias Editorial , a publishing imprint that he established in 2006. The imprint publishes essential and fundamental texts within contemporary art that are out of print or have not been translated into Spanish, as well as new texts and interviews with artists with whom he collaborates. Thanks to the simple style of the editions, Alias makes the texts affordable and accessible to the public. Damián Ortega lives and works in Mexico City.

About the artist

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