Delcy Morelos
gallery 9
The Womb Space
Delcy Morelos (Tierralta, Colombia, 1967) is one of the most renowned Colombian artists on the international scene. She considers herself to be a painter, despite the fact that her recent work has involved the creation of volumetric site-specific interventions, a sort of perversion of land art and minimalism. Her work—which began with pictorial exercises inspired by experiences with earth, skin color and violence in Colombia, presented in more or less conventional formats such as paint on canvas and paper—has expanded outward into installations and site-specific pieces that provoke reflections on rootedness and our experiences of a given territory. Her large-scale installations are made with materials obtained from the places she visits, configured through a reading of the exhibition site. The result is an experience that often involves sight, smell, hearing and touch, provoking an experience among its spectators that is as sensorial as it is mystical and transcendent.
This project inaugurates a new line of pieces commissioned especially for the MUAC’s Gallery 9. Following a series of visits to Mexico City, Oaxaca and Chiapas, she designed an installation that would encompass the entirety of this gallery. For some time now, Morelos has been investigating our varied relationships with earth, food, magic and mythologies, allowing her to reconceptualize our social relationships as well as our relationship with nature. For her, the Earth is feminine, particularly in its relationship with fertility and nourishment; human beings have historically created technologies that allow them to establish relationships with this reality. These techniques for sustenance are not only defined by forms of production and consumption, but also by relationships with the divine, the magical, the natural and the social.
Morelos understands the Earth as a divinity that encompasses the cycles of life and death as well as one that has always been at the center of cycles of exploitation, war and violence. This is why her artworks seek to reformulate our relationship with the Earth in order to restore its importance and astonish us with its vitality. This piece was inspired by the circular structures built by many pre-Hispanic cultures—such as Caral in Peru, Ciudad Perdida in Colombia or Baños de Nezahualcóyotl in Mexico State—as well as by shaft tombs, land art, minimalism, arte povera and modern architecture, but particularly by the Cuicuilco pyramid and the UNAM Sculptural Space, both located near MUAC. Morelos’s intention is for this piece to be an inversion of the relationships and connections circumscribed by these two structures.
The Sculptural Space consists of 64 triangular prisms arranged in a 120-meter-diameter circle; at the center of this ring is volcanic rock from the eruption of Xitle, and outside the ring is the UNAM Nature Reserve. Horizontally, this piece puts the relationship between exterior and interior into tension. Delcy Morelos’s intention is to invert this relationship into a vertical tension by alluding to the earth as a womb and the space as a place of maternal protection. If the Sculptural Space involves a certain convention of the Western gaze and experience by primarily serving as a frame for the landscape, the visitor to The Womb Space is no longer a spectator but a guest in this place for protection and introspection. The earth that forms part of this piece was obtained from cornfields and the gallery’s aroma evokes this pillar of local culture. Morelos is thus not interested in provoking a gaze so much as an internal state or horizon.
Artist: Delcy Morelos (Tierra Alta, Colombia, 1967)
Curation: Alejandra Labastida, Daniel Montero
National Visual Arts Production made possible by the fiscal incentive established in article 190 of the income Tax Law (EFIARTES).
Exhibition Information
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Exhibition Information
