Damián Ortega

MONOGRAPHS & CATALOGS

Damián Ortega: The Beetle and Other Works Essays by Eungie Joo, Hari Kunzru and Alma Ruiz. This first North American monograph on Mexican artist Damian Ortega documents 10 years of work focused on conceptual practice, social organization, and humor, including the installations and performances that make up
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CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS/REDCAT
ISBN: 9780974983134
$39.95 | Awaiting stock

Damián Ortega Edited and with text by Friedrich Meschede. The Mexican artist Damián Ortega loves to dissemble iconic consumer goods--Coke bottles, Volkswagen Beetles, even tortilla chips--and recombine their parts to produce refreshing sculptural perspectives on their cultural meaning and function.
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HATJE CANTZ
ISBN: 9783775720755
$35.00 | In stock

Damián Ortega

Damián Ortega

Survival of the Idea

Edited and with text by Friedrich Meschede.
Published by Hatje Cantz

The Mexican artist Damián Ortega loves to dissemble iconic consumer goods--Coke bottles, Volkswagen Beetles, even tortilla chips--and recombine their parts to produce refreshing sculptural perspectives on their cultural meaning and function. For this book he has put together a selection of drawings, made between 1991 and 2007, that were created to plot these sculptures and their installations. Ortega, who was once a political cartoonist, retains in his drawings an open-endedness that invites the viewer to imagine the work’s possible applications. The book’s title, Supervivencia de la Idea (Survival of the Idea), refers to its partial status as an archive of ideas--some of which have already been executed, others of which await realization, as with Ortega’s recent mobile obelisk for New York’s Central Park.
Damián Ortega was born in 1967 in Mexico City and currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He has had solo museum exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2005), Tate Modern, London (2005) and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2002), among others.

Damián Ortega: The Beetle and Other Works

Essays by Eungie Joo, Hari Kunzru and Alma Ruiz.
Published by California Institute of the Arts/Redcat

This first North American monograph on Mexican artist Damian Ortega documents 10 years of work focused on conceptual practice, social organization, and humor, including the installations and performances that make up his acclaimed Beetle Trilogy, several works never before exhibited and a great deal of unpublished material. Most of what's here hasn't been seen before. The first episode of the trilogy, "The Cosmic Thing," a disassembled Volkswagen suspended in the air, was featured in Gabriel Orozco's Il Quotidiano Alterato at the 2003 Venice Biennale, and was one of the most widely reproduced images of that year's exhibition. "Moby Dick," a heroic action involving the artist's Beetle, a live band, ropes and pulleys, followed, and then "Beetle '83 Escarabajo," a ritual return to the vehicle's place of birth, closed the cycle. The Beetle Trilogy and Other Works includes a new comic, 150 color images and an original essay by Hari Kunzru, author of The Impressionist and one of Granata's 20 "Best Young British Novelists" in 2003.