03What to See & DoCULTURE
TODAY’S PICK — MASP — AVENIDA PAULISTA
Damián Ortega, Matéria e Energia — and the Thursday late hours that make it work
If you give one weekday evening to São Paulo culture this week, give it to the Damián Ortega retrospective at MASP, which on Thursdays stays open until 20h — the one night you can see it after work without the weekend crowds, and a smart move before the Virada Cultural turns the museum into a 24-hour scrum on Saturday. Curated by Adriano Pedrosa with Rodrigo Moura and Yudi Rafael, the show runs through September 13 and gathers more than thirty years of the Mexico City artist (b. 1967), the most influential figure of the post-1990s Mexican generation that turned the everyday object into the raw material of conceptual sculpture. After São Paulo it travels to Centro Cultural La Moneda in Santiago in partnership with MALBA Buenos Aires.
What to look for: Cosmic Thing (2002), the exploded Volkswagen Beetle suspended on cables in the largest second-floor room, the work that made Ortega’s name at the Venice Biennale and the obvious entry point; the photographic series investigating object-as-diagram in the adjacent room; and the tijolo and pedra works that read everyday material as social and political geometry. The Brazilian-architecture pieces commissioned for the São Paulo iteration are in the third room. Per Pedrosa in the catalogue, “Ortega’s practice converts the everyday object into a vector of social, economic and political narrative.” Allow 90 minutes minimum.
