Gabriel de la Mora

Born in 1968 in Mexico City, Mexico.
Lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico.

Gabriel de la Mora collects photographs, tools, residual materials, refuse, found documents, hair, and old papers, among other unclassifiable objects that persist between the fantastic, the macabre and the repulsive.  In his studio – a mix between a cabinet of curiosities and a forensics lab – a cross between this accumulation and his vital instinct takes place, a drive that submits the past to the hermeneutic scrutiny of the present.  Through rigorous formal procedures and the conceptual methodologies of contemporary art, de la Mora alchemically reinscribes these residues in which the past survives with a systematic modus operandi that recalls the attention to detail of a detective’s or a criminologist’s examination of fingerprints.

Having trained as an architect and subsequently studying for his Master’s of Fine Arts in Painting from the Pratt Institute in New York, Gabriel de la Mora’s work lies in questioning and experimenting with the interstitial limits between painting, drawing and sculpture.  In his hands, these original media of symbolic experience become records prone to formalist abstraction, as well as autobiographical indices.  Linking constructivist languages with the evocative, fortuitous discoveries of dadaist experience de la Mora updates the minimalist/conceptual optic to reveal the intimate and personal within the universal convention of modernist abstraction.

More than a painter, sculptor or draughtsman, de la Mora is an artist who works with ideas, possibilities and concepts.  In that sense, the metaphysical category of time becomes a fundamental factor in each of his pieces.  For him, a work of art attempts to outlive the person who creates it.  It aspires toward eternity, since life’s desires are clear evidence of an inexorable death drive.  There exists a principal goal as an artist and this has to do with the search for an equilibrium between the conceptual and the formal in order to signify the universal, from the appearance of an idea until its execution in monochromatic surfaces, lines, volumes, documents and records of his processes.  These intermingle, giving rise not only to works of art but also to an archive in which the artist obsessively safeguards the passage of time.  Gabriel de la Mora’s work is a constellation of indices for the apparition of a metaphysical totality.  In it, the occult, the mysterious, the elusive – that is, those experiences that are prone to estrangement – are presented to us as the familiar.

Selected Solo Exhibitions
2012 – T.O.E.F.M.U.T.I.T.O.A.I.I. –  Sicardi Gallery, Houston, Texas.
2012 – Exposición Panamericana – N.C. Arte, Bogotá, Colombia.
2011 – Originalmentefalso – Galería OMR, Ciudad de México, México
2011 – Frágil / Fragile – MOLAA, Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California, Estados Unidos, Curator: Cecilia Fajardo Hill, Long Beach, California
2008 – d.i.b.u.j.o.s. – C.C. Bastero Kulturgunea, Andoain (Gipuzkoa), Spain

Selected Group Exhbitions
2013 –  California-Pacific Triennial, Chief Curator: Dan Cameron, Orange County Museum, California
2013 – OPINIONE LATINA – Francesca Minini Gallery, Milan, Italy.
2012 – PRIVACY – Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Curator: Martina Weinhart, Germany.
2011 – Destello – La Colección Jumex, Ecatepec, Estado de México, México
2010 – Superficies del Deseo – MUAC Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Ciudad de México, México
2010 – The Visceral Body – Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canadá
2009 – Hecho en casa – Museo de Arte Moderno, Ciudad de México, México
2009 – 89 Km CGAC Collection – MARCO Museo de Arte contemporánea de Vigo, Spain