Date
From May 29, 2026 to October 25, 2026
Gabriel de la Mora: La Petite Mort brings together two decades of production by the artist (Mexico City, 1968), whose practice is distinguished by the transformation of materials through processes that oscillate between the meticulous and the elemental. Through operations that evoke the alchemical—from delicate compositions using butterfly wings or human hair to the recovery of eroded architectural surfaces—De la Mora constructs objects of great formal subtlety and intense sensory charge.
The exhibition proposes a reading that begins with the seduction of surfaces and delves into the underlying impulses and desires within his work. The exhibition is organized into six sections—the body, erasure, heat, the edge of desire, touch, and the pleasure of the viewer—which reveal the fundamental tensions that run through the artist’s practice.
Curated by: Tobias Ostrander
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), 2026. Photograph: Arthur Mora
Gabriel de la Mora
Gabriel de la Mora
Gabriel de la Mora
Gabriel de la Mora
Gabriel de la Mora
In its poetic exploration of two decades of the work of Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora, the exhibition La Petite Mort engages a strategy of conflating physical and aesthetic pleasure. The “little death” of its title is a French euphemism for an orgasm. The term was employed by critical thinker Roland Barthes to speak to the sense of abandonment or loss that the height of physical pleasure can engender. There is an implied loss in De la Mora’s artworks that involve a symbolic or physical death, most often displayed through the materials he uses and the way they evidence wear, recollection, manipulation and obsessive construction. Organized into six thematic sections —Bodies, Erasure, Heat, Edge of Desire, Touch, and The Pleasure of the Viewer—, this exhibition looks beyond the formal and intellectual readings of the artist’s work to speculate on the latent and unconscious creative drives that push his production, drawing out their surreal and uncanny character.
Tobias Ostrander
Accompanying the exhibition Gabriel de la Mora: La Petite Mort this edition includes an in depth reading of the artist’s work by the curator, Tobias Ostrander, accompanied by newly commissioned essays art historian Maria Minera, and the writer and poet Pablo Soler Frost that each reflect on aspects of death, eroticism and transformation in De la Mora’s practice.
Published by RM in collaboration with Museo Jumex and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, this volume illustrates more than 80 works by the artist produced over the last 25 years with numerous details showing the precision and allure of his compositions which employ materials such as human hair, fragments of eggshells, butterfly wings and obsidian among them.
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