Gabriel Sierra

03.05 – 28.06/ 2015
The Renaissance Society, Chicago

The Renaissance Society presents an exhibition of new works by Gabriel Sierra, the Bogotá-based artist’s first solo museum show in the United States. His project consists of a group of constructions to stand in or to walk over, which relate abstractly to the idea of inhabiting different moments of space and time. The exhibition features a cyclical title that changes hourly:

10:00 am    Monday Impressions. 

11:00 am    How the Outside Leaks into the Room.

12:00 ­pm    Smells Like 100 Years Old.

1:00 pm     The Room Is in My Eye. The Space under My Body.

2:00 pm     In the Meantime, (This Place Will Be Empty after 5:00 pm).

3:00 pm     An Actual Location for This Moment.

4:00 pm     Few Will Leave Their Place to Come Here for Some Minutes. 

5:00 pm     Did You Know Who Built Your House? 

Sierra is intrigued by the language of man-made objects and the dimensions of the spaces in which we live, work, and think. His practice employs a variety of techniques – from sculpture and spatial interventions to performance and texts – to examine how the human body functions in relation to its environment. Trained in architecture and design, and drawing on the history of Latin American Modernism, Sierra connects the perception of forms and materials to the construction of language, communication, and knowledge.

Sierra’s installation at the Renaissance Society features materials (for example, wood, stones, and plant matter) that have been isolated from their usual geographic situations, processed and domesticated for the context of the exhibition. By inviting visitors to walk over and among the constructions with no determined path, the artist sets up a series of areas that refer to the transitional space of the antechamber. They are not destinations in themselves, but passages of experience leading from one to another, momentary neutral zones.

The exhibition’s title will change every hour to frame the specific moment in which the visitor experiences the work. Like the various constructions Sierra offers, this shifting title experiments with the ways in which environments, and the exhibition in particular, are perceived across time.

An exhibition catalogue featuring essays by Douglas Fogle and Irene V. Small and documentation of the installation is forthcoming.

Gabriel Sierra (born 1975, San Juan Nepomuceno, Colombia) lives and works in Bogotá. Recent solo exhibitions include ggaabbrriieellssiieerrrraa at Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, Mexico (2013) and Thus Far at Peephole, Milan, Italy (2013). His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Do Objeto para o Mundo, COLEÇÃO INHOTIM, Itaú Cultutal, São Paulo (2015),Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative: Latin America, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014), Impulse, Reason, Sense, Conflict at Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami (2014) and The 2013 Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2013).