Born in 1967 in Mexico City, Damian Ortega is the leading Mexican artist of the generation that emerged in the wake of the influence of Gabriel Orozco and Francis Alas, and has been exhibited internationally in galleries including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Tate Modern, London, the 50th Venice Biennale and White Cube Gallery London. Do it Yourself is a survey of the innovative sculptural and installation work of Damian Ortega. In works that spin, dangle, sprawl and climb, Ortega reveals his fascination with how everyday things--whether man made or organic--are constructed, and his keen interest in the tools and elements that facilitate the process of construction, from pickaxes and pulleys to bricks to molecules. A 1983 VW Beetle, a familiar sight in Ortega's native Mexico City, is disassembled, then loosely reassembled to hang suspended from the gallery ceiling. In imaginative and humorous works, Ortega takes things apart to put them together again in an unexpected manner, animating and reorganizing the world as we know it. A former political cartoonist, Ortega infuses his sculptural work with an incisive wit, bringing the humorist's eye to works in which materials are manipulated in surprising ways. His objects, never allowed to rest, are pulled apart, suspended, or rearranged,reflecting the dynamism of the world around us in various ways that we might otherwise overlook. In this way, Ortega subtly subverts not only conventional views of sculpture as permanent and monumental, but also unsettles our sense of our bodies and our homes as self-contained and impermeable.
