Gabriel Sierra. The First Impressions of the Year 2018 (During the early days of the year 2017)

Gabriel Sierra
The First Impressions of the Year 2018 (During the early days of the year 2017)

The work of Gabriel Sierra emerges as a process that can be associated with abstract notions of perception and communication between humans and their built environment. It represents basic experiences and explores the functions of physical space and the human body, commenting on the problem of how we build using forms, shapes, and materials and how what we build influences our behavior in turn.

Employing a variety of geometry-based strategies involving objects, structures, spatial constructions, and other elements, Sierra uses the context of the exhibition to experiment with ordinary situations and their presentation. For example, in Before Present, his solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich, he repeated the same room three times to instill a sense of déjà-vu in the visitors. At the Renaissance Society, he changed the exhibition’s title every hour to mark the exact moment a visitor entered the gallery. In Thus Far at Peep-Hole, he divided the installation into areas that were open to visitors on different days of the week; to see the entire exhibition, visitors had to visit it on four different days.

Sierra’s work has been presented at Kunsthalle Zürich, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and the Sculpture Center, New York (2015); the 2013 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and Peep-Hole, Milan (2013); and at CAC Brétigny, Brétigny-sur-Orge (2006).

Gabriel Sierra, born in 1975 in San Juan Nepomuceno, Bolívar (Colombia), lives and works in Bogotá.

Curated by Bettina Spörr