Gabriel de la Mora

Sicardi Gallery invites you to celebrate the opening of Lucíferos, an exhibition of new work by Gabriel de la Mora. The artist will be present at the opening reception from 6-8 pm, Thursday, October 30. A conversation and book-signing with the artist will take place at 1 pm, Saturday, November 1.

In Gabriel de la Mora’s most recent body of work, he uses fire-making as a vehicle for reconsidering geometric abstraction. Striking thousands of matches against the red phosphorus-covered paper on the sides of matchboxes, de la Mora collects the used strikers and arranges them in compositions that create repeating patterns, rectangular grids, and minimalist constructions. The resulting imagery evokes two distinct historical moments. On the one hand, the enigmatic geometries are suggestive of Minimalist paintings from the 1950s and 1960s. And, on the other, the used object, marked by the act of striking matches, insistently presents another story: that of the industrialization of fire through the invention of matches (originally called Lucifers). By pairing these two narratives, de la Mora presents a new series of questions about abstraction and vision, invention and industrialization.

Gabriel de la Mora (b. 1968, Mexico) studied architecture before completing his M.F.A. at Pratt Institute, New York.  His solo exhibition Lo que no vemos lo que nos mira, curated by Willy Kautz, is currently on view at Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico.  He has had solo exhibitions at NC-Arte, Bogotá, Colombia; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico; Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA), Long Beach, California, USA; and the Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, D.C., among other museums. This is his third solo exhibition at Sicardi Gallery.