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Based in Mexico City and Berlin, Mexican artist Damián Ortega creates powerful visual metaphors with his disassembled and suspended art installations. His artworks are inspired by a wide range of trivial objects, from pick-axes to bricks, rubbish bins and tortillas, described as a “mischievous process of transformation and dysfunction.”
One of his most celebrated works titled “Cosmic Thing” (2002), shows a disassembled Volkswagen Beetle, suspended from wires in mid-air in the manner of a mechanic’s instruction manual. The result is a fragmented object that offers a new perspective of the car first developed in Nazi Germany which was later produced en masse in Mexico. Through his work, Damián Ortega discusses specific economic, aesthetic and cultural situations and how regional culture affects commodity consumption. He began his career as a political cartoonist and his art has the intellectual rigour and sense of playfulness, causing an association with his previous occupation. Ortega’s works highlight the hidden poetry of everyday objects as well as their social and political complexity.
All images © Damián Ortega
