Expanded View

Found, deconstructed, suspended: on Ortega’s dramatic and satirical airborne art

Before Mexican sculptor Damián Ortega (born 1967) rose to prominence in the contemporary art world, he was a political cartoonist. This transition was intuitive for Ortega, and his sculptures and installations maintain the piercing, satirical eye required of his former occupation. He is internationally admired for his sculptures that literally deconstruct and reconfigure commercial products such as Coke bottles or, in one of his most celebrated works, a Volkswagen Beetle. Ortega presents these vernacular objects in precise arrangements that cohere into witty representations of diagrams, faces, words and buildings. Many of these pieces, however, are suspended in the air; by virtue of the space between the objects, the resulting representations appear fragmented.
This catalog, published alongside the exhibition at Centro Botín, exclusively displays these suspended works.