Mateo López

"Undo List"

The Drawing Center

New York, 35 Wooster Street

In his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, the Colombian multimedia artist Mateo López introduces a new body of work featuring works on paper, film, video and sculpture. The Brooklyn-based artist’s signature themes such as narration of minor histories and investigation of mundane details revive in his simplistic, yet whimsy technique. In Vertebrae, a human spine made out of paper and string is hung onto the wall with a metal nail or a glossy graphite paper curls around a bent wooden ruler in Serpentine. Such minimal and inventive concoctions comment on interconnectedness of human experience and humans’ association with their surroundings. 

Mateo López, Still from Time as Activity, 2016. 2-channel video projection, 54 minutes.Courtesy of the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York.

López, who studied architecture for two years before going to University of Los Andes in Bogotá for a degree in visual arts, is heavily influenced by architectural elements such as geometry, form and space. While his work is often times infused with autobiographical elements that blur the distinction between art and reality, López’s interdisciplinary approach to art nourishes from daily encounters, mundane rituals, and subtle visual codes embedded into life. “Mateo comes out of training as an architect, with an architect’s way of drawing. It may be fine to have that very precise, fine instrument, but I think it would be useful to think in a different way, a rough way, to do something that’s messy. In the long term the work has to allow the vulnerability of the self into it. So I’ve encouraged him to draw himself walking, to perform in front of a camera,” says William Kentridge who mentored López in Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative in 2012. 

On view through March 19, 2017