ART CITIES:Edinburgh-Damián Ortega

Through the use of wit and humor, Damián Ortega deconstructs both familiar objects and processes, altering their functions and transforming them into novel experiences and scenarios. Ortega’s works play with a scale that ranges from the molecular to the cosmic, applying the concepts of physics to human interactions, in which chaos, accidents, and instability produce a system of relations in flux.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The Fruitmarket Gallery Archive

Although Damián Ortega’s works take form in 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 quotidian converge to activate a new way of looking, one that transcends the original context of simple objects and everyday relations. Damián Ortega has made new sculptures for his solo exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, focusing on the forces of nature. The works look at how wind, water, earth and fire act on the earth both independently of and in relationship to humankind. The works for his first solo exhibition in Scotland,  are predominantly made from clay, the most elemental of materials. Ortega uses clay to form waves, sculpt icebergs and to track the eroding power of a river on a sequence of plains made from brick. He shows us the sculptural agency of nature and also of mankind, looking at how the landscape has shaped itself but also at 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 an 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.

Info: The Fruitmarket Gallery, 45 Market Street, Edinburgh, Duration: 9/7-23/10/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 11:00-18:00, Sun 11:00-17:00, www.fruitmarket.co.uk