Matter and Energy

Damián Ortega: Matter and Energy is the Mexican artist’s first major survey exhibition in South America. Thirty-five works spanning more than three decades bring together sculpture, installation, photography and video to examine how everyday objects can be dismantled, suspended and reconfigured.

Ortega treats sculpture as a negotiation between force, resistance, balance and gravity. Major works include Cosmic Thing, in which a Volkswagen Beetle is completely disassembled and suspended as a spatial diagram, and Controller of the Universe, where worn hand tools radiate outward in a frozen explosion.

The exhibition connects these formal experiments with questions of labour, industrialisation, consumption and Latin American urban life. Ordinary materials become a way of moving between the intimate and the cosmic, the social and the mechanical.