Camina Habla Canta Baila

Mateo López addresses themes as chance, time, craft, oral histories as research, and daily happenings. His practice explores cartography and travel, and ceaselessly and methodologically references the act of making. It spans from drawing and installation to architecture, film, and performance—across each medium histories and materials overlap and intertwine.

The works included in this exhibition are made from objects found by the artist while traveling or walking around the cities of Bogotá and New York. The starting point is his photographic series PEOPLE, unique images of ephemeral sculptures conceived as portraits of people who visited his studio in Brooklyn between 2014 and 2022, formed by elements he found on his way to his working space from home during that time. The elements that compose the sculptures coexisted for years on the shelves of the artist’s studio and eventually ended up being assembled together and turned into collages. When the artist moved back to his hometown Bogota, these objects were discarded, being only contained in the portraits from that moment on.

Following this methodology of recycling and resignifying objects, López has developed a series of new interactive and wearable pieces that, along with retaken works from different moments and places in his career, come to life generating a theater of objects that inhabits, this time, the gallery space.