Delcy Morelos: El oscuro de abajo
El oscuro de abajo
Galerie Marian Goodman | 14 October - 21 December 2023
“In Andean ancestral traditions, the human being is living earth, I am a body, I am earth. In the exhibition space, the earth expresses itself; it is the center and mirror of what we are.” –Delcy Morelos, 2023
Galerie Marian Goodman Paris is pleased to announce El oscuro de abajo, Delcy Morelos’ inaugural exhibition with the gallery, and the artist’s first solo presentation in France. El oscuro de abajo opens a few weeks following El abrazo, her first U.S. solo presentation at Dia Art Foundation in New York. For her Paris exhibit, the artist presents a large-scale installation using earth, the material at the heart of her work since 2012. The exhibition also includes pictorial works on textile, natural fiber, and paper, created over the last two decades. Brought together, these works outline a practice rooted in ancestral Andean cosmovision and the aesthetics of Minimal Art. Morelos’ abstract works, with their formidable evocations, inspire rumination on the interplay between human beings and earth, the human body and materiality.
Delcy Morelos in Conversation with Humberto Moro
In her early works, Morelos focused primarily on painting, applying natural red pigments to paper. Her chromatic research directed her attention to the intersection between body and violence. Over time, her material investigations extended into ceramics and textiles, and this work, along with her continued use of natural materials such as earth, clay, fabric, and plant fibers, led her to gradually develop a more sculptural practice, and, more recently, large-scale multisensory installations.
Installation view of two works in the series
Acrylic on jute
Acrylic on jute
Downstairs, visitors will find themselves confronted by El oscuro de abajo (2023), a large-scale immersive installation specifically designed for a subterranean space. Composed of earth mixed with cinnamon and cloves, the work occupies a large part of the walls, floor and ceiling, precisely delineating a cavern in the space, a sanctuary into which we are invited to enter. A small corridor left in reserve on the floor leads into the heart of this abstract, monochrome, rough landscape. The olfactory invitation becomes more prominent, reinforcing a meditative feeling of symbiosis with the work.
“I create an experience for the human senses with images, smells, silences, tastes, textures. I like synesthesia and I am moved by the alchemy that awakens different emotions in each person. I speak to the human body, I take it through a sensory threshold to the dimension of the sacred, to the void, to the primordial terrestrial womb.”
Born in 1967 in Tierralta in the department of Córdoba in Colombia, Delcy Morelos studied at the Cartagena School of Fine Arts. She lives and works in Bogotá.
Morelos’s work was recently exhibited at the Arsenale within the main exhibition “The Milk of Dreams” of the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) as well as in the Aichi Triennial in Japan (2022). Past solo exhibitions include shows at Museo Moderno, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2022); Santa Fe Gallery, Bogotá, Colombia (2019); Fundación NC-Arte, Bogotá (2018); Röda Sten Konsthall, Göteborg, Sweden (2018); at Fundación Fuga, Bogotá, Colombia (2015); Barranquilla Museum of Modern Art, Colombia (2006); Gt Gallery, Flax Arts Studios Residence Program, Belfast, Northern Ireland (2006); Academia Superior de Artes de Bogota, Santa Fe Gallery, Bogotá, Colombia (2004); and Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia (2002).
She has participated in many group exhibitions in international institutions such as “Something (you can't see, on the other side, of a wall from this side) casts a shadow,” SOMArts Culural Center, San Francisco, USA (2018); “Medellín, une histoire colombienne des années 1950 à aujourd’hui”, Musée des Abattoirs, Toulouse, France (2017); “Du som jag, Havremagasinet”, Boden, Sweden (2016) and Sami Center for Contemporary Art, Karasjok, Norway (2017); 7 Mercosul Biennial, “Grito e escuta”, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2009); “MDE 07, Espacios de hospitalidad”, Medellín, Colombia (2007); ES2002 Tijuana/II International Biennial, Tijuana Cultural Center CECUT, Mexico (2002), and the VI Havana Biennial, Cuba (1997).
Press contact: Raphaële Coutant, raphaele@mariangoodman.com or +33 (0)1 48 04 70 52
Delcy Morelos Now Represented by Marian Goodman
ARTnews (3 October 2023)— Delcy Morelos, a Colombian sculptor who was a star of last year’s Venice Biennale, has gotten representation with Marian Goodman Gallery, which will mount a solo show of her work this month in Paris. Morelos is also currently preparing to open at the Dia Art Foundation in Chelsea, where she will exhibit two new installations that, like her Biennale work, are composed of earth. Her Biennale installation featured large blocks of soil that were arranged to form a maze-like structure that viewers could enter. With its sizable chunks of clay and more brought into an art space, the piece invoked Land art while also alluding to Andean and Amazonian Amerindian cosmologies.