Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora's first-ever solo exhibition in Europe opens at Timothy Taylor Gallery
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Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora's first-ever solo exhibition in Europe opens at Timothy Taylor Gallery
De la Mora, who draws upon the defunct and the obsolete, repurposes industrial materials, granting a new reason for existence to the unusable.



LONDON.- Timothy Taylor will stage the first solo exhibition in Europe of Gabriel de la Mora 17 March – 7 May 2016 at the London gallery, with three series of new work from the artist, marking twenty years since his transition from a career in architecture.

De la Mora, who draws upon the defunct and the obsolete, repurposes industrial materials, granting a new reason for existence to the unusable. The artist, once dedicated to a career designing the built environment, today devotes his time to deconstruction.

The title of the exhibition refers to the sequential iteration of the works from a material perspective – from previously intended function to current form – but also from an existential one. The artist is interested in the life narrative of physical objects and their materiality. This exploration manifests in Serial, with three material forms.

The exhibition environment will be enhanced by a soundscape designed in collaboration with Humberto Polar. This audial realisation of the two-dimensional works in the exhibition is inspired by the sound of the central material source of the new works: a commercial offset printing press. For the exhibition, the sounds are manipulated to form a minimal electronic music track to reflect the genre of music the artist associates with this creative period.

Rubber blankets and Aluminium Plates
The repurposed rubber blankets and aluminium plates that constitute these series are salvaged from a four-colour offset printing press. Rendered useless following colour saturation, rubber blankets from offset printing house the remnants of millions of pages of past reproductions.

Together with the aluminium plates that form the press, these vital technical components were a means to an evolving record of mass communication. Thousands of messages and images recorded within each, layered, dried, and eventually lost, are afforded a renewed existence in these works.

De la Mora has reconstructed the blankets and plates to offer a second iteration of purpose, a formal one rather than functional, as, for the artist, purpose is not contingent upon function: Practicality is decommissioned to make way for an artistic reinterpretation.

Striking in colour, enriched with past impressions, each work hangs in representation of the images previously imposed.

These series explore the various possibilities of painting, where accidents and waste caused by the mass-printing process generate primary materials that are later reconfigured into ‘paintings’.

If in the age of mechanical reproduction, art ceases to be unique and unrepeatable in turn losing its symbolic power, this project makes way for a reversal of these values.

Crystals of Inevidence
Unlike the two other series within Serial, where information from discarded materials has been used after the object has fulfilled its initial function, here de la Mora’s glass coverslips and microscope slides are appropriated prior to their intended functional use.

The foundation of these compositions is based on seriality and repetition, where we find endless formal possibilities and where light and shadow play a key role.

“Crystals of Inevidence is a strategy to visualise emptiness or a poetic opening onto the ‘non-specific’ through an apparently meaningless object. This work encourages us to look at the non-evident (rather than the evident) through a ‘pictorial object’, that is nonetheless anti-illusionist and transparent,” explains the artist.

De la Mora acquired from a flea-market a box of 96 stereoscopic glass slides from the early twentieth century, unexpectedly blank, never having fulfilled their intended function. In response, the artist has presented the slides on a wall, within the original packaging. No longer available; original stereoscopic glass slides are augmented here by microscopic slides to complete the series.

For Gabriel de la Mora the artwork already exists before the artist, and therefore it is not his role to either create or destroy, but merely to transform. By repurposing debris salvaged from flea markets and antique shops, de la Mora creates alchemical works that both prescribe to the object specificity set by the precedents of Minimalism and Abstraction in terms of form, and quietly engage with the figurative through their content.

Worn soles of shoes, damaged photographs, matchboxes and found paintings are passed through a process of pentimento – of reworking, erasing and altering – generating palimpsest works that convey the effects of the passage of time, natural elements and histories of use; galvanising these narratives through a regulated surface.

With a working methodology that is as mystical as it is disciplined, de la Mora’s use of repetition connects with notions of Zen philosophy, whereby recurrent actions lead to a meditative practice. These, in turn, have the power to decelerate time; or in this instance, suspend it.

Recent solo exhibitions include: (f) Galería OMR, Mexico City, Mexico (2015); Lo que no vemos lo que nos mira, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2014); Lucíferos, Sicardi Gallery, Houston, USA (2014); Señales Aleatorias/Ruido Blanco, Museo de Arte de Sonora (MUSAS), Mexico (2012); Exposición Panamericana, NC-arte, Bogotá, Colombia (2012); Ruido Blanco / White Noise, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (MACO), Oaxaca, Mexico (2011); Frágil/Fragile, Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA), Long Beach, USA (2011).

De la Mora’s works are represented in collections internationally including: Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, USA; Art Museum of the Americas, Organisation of American States, Washington D.C., USA; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico; Fudación Televisa, Mexico City, Mexico; Perez Art Museum, Miami, USA; Colección Banco de la Republica, Bogota, Colombia; ARTIUM, Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain; Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, USA; Colección FEMSA, Monterrey, Mexico; Fundación/Colección JUMEX, Mexico City, Mexico; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA; and The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, USA.

Gabriel de la Mora was born in 1968 in Colima, Mexico and now lives and works in Mexico City. He studied architecture with honours in Mexico City (1987–1991) and received his MFA with honours from the Pratt Institute, New York in 2003, through the support of a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholarship, and a Jacques and Natasha Gelman Scholarship.










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