David Lamelas, Untitled (Falling Wall), 1993/2026, drywall and larch wood, dimensions variable
2026. David Lamelas
“The Machine,” David Lamelas’s long-awaited first major solo exhibition in New York, is a masterfully orchestrated survey spanning 1965 to the present. The presentation offers a sustained reconsideration of what constitutes artistic experience, from the Conceptual turn of the 1960s to the contemporary moment. Throughout, Lamelas persistently blurs the distinctions separating sculpture, information, architecture, media, and geopolitics, folding them into a multifaceted practice that remains remarkably coherent.
The exhibition foregrounds how certain concerns migrate across media, while generating new systems of transmission and perception. Questions of space, for instance, often emerge most forcefully through film and video. This circulation is directly addressed in Reading an Extract from Labyrinths by J. L. Borges, 1970, a subtitled but otherwise silent video in which a young woman reads a passage by the Argentine luminary whose literary universe contained infinite temporal unfoldings and recursive architectures of thought. “I deny the existence of one single time,” a subtitle declares. On the grainy black-and-white screen, the movement of the reader’s lips becomes yet another floating element in a world of signs—with an alienating aftertaste, in the Brechtian sense of a Verfremdungseffekt. For both Borges and Lamelas, the labyrinth—a spatial chimera—serves as an epistemological model: a living puzzle through which perception continually encounters its own limits.
Installed nearby, A Study of the Relationships Between Inner and Outer Space, 1969, expands this inquiry. Produced after Lamelas’s move to London, where he studied sculpture with Anthony Caro and developed close ties with Phillip King, the video stretches the category of sculpture beyond the object. Distances between buildings, demographic distributions across neighborhoods, and the organization of the urban fabric itself become novel sculptural parameters. Lamelas’s interest lies less in invention than in the circulation of ideas—the transformation of concepts into artistic outcomes and their subsequent return to the realm of thought.
Lamelas belongs to one of the first generations of postwar, transnational artists formed within an increasingly globalized world, in which movement between nations became both materially feasible and conceptually productive—a condition that has regained urgency amid the resurgence of anti-immigration politics across the globe. Buenos Aires, London, Los Angeles, and Paris function throughout his work as more than biographical coordinates. They situate the artist within an expanded network of exchange while simultaneously reaffirming the significance of Argentine artistic production without reducing it to a national category.
For Office of Information About the Vietnam War at Three Levels: The Visual Image, Text, and Audio, 1968, a telex machine positioned atop an office desk received radio reports from the Vietnam War, which were read aloud by performers throughout the exhibition. The work was included in the 1968 Venice Biennale, an event whose current edition is likewise marked by the open wounds of ongoing wars (see Iran, Israel, Palestine, Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and Venezuela). Witnessing how the world’s most decorated event of institutionalized art metabolizes geopolitical conflagrations, oscillating between outbursts of denunciation and attitudes of neglect, is to appreciate Lamelas’s capacity to concatenate entire systems of thought in a simple operation that encompasses the urgencies of more than half a century. Office of Information also foregrounds the paradoxical repetition of singularities, reinforcing Lamelas’s proposition that the specificity of time and place embedded in his works is renewed each time they are reexhibited.
This discursive machinery links macrohistorical forces to the smallest of gestures. Geopolitical conflict and the act of pouring milk into a glass until it overflows, as we see in the video To Pour Milk into a Glass, 1972, simply emerge as different scales of the same inquiry. Across the exhibition, Lamelas repeatedly returns to problems of containment: milk within a glass, artworks within galleries, work within life, political catastrophes within the routines of everyday experience. What emerges is an interrogation of the satirical ambiguity of control itself—the persistent desire to assign stable limits to information, spaces, objects, and bodies, to establish a boundary separating inside from outside. Yet this barrier, which promises protection from contradiction and disorder, remains fundamentally fictional. Indeed, the possibility of collapse is announced immediately upon entering the exhibition in Untitled (Falling Wall), 1993/2026, in which a large panel of drywall is held upright by larch-wood supports. The leaning wall appears suspended in a perpetual state of impending free fall. It has been crumbling since the moment it was made. In Lamelas’s work, collapse rarely arrives as an event, but rather as an enduring condition.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 65, no. 1, September 2026
The exhibition foregrounds how certain concerns migrate across media, while generating new systems of transmission and perception. Questions of space, for instance, often emerge most forcefully through film and video. This circulation is directly addressed in Reading an Extract from Labyrinths by J. L. Borges, 1970, a subtitled but otherwise silent video in which a young woman reads a passage by the Argentine luminary whose literary universe contained infinite temporal unfoldings and recursive architectures of thought. “I deny the existence of one single time,” a subtitle declares. On the grainy black-and-white screen, the movement of the reader’s lips becomes yet another floating element in a world of signs—with an alienating aftertaste, in the Brechtian sense of a Verfremdungseffekt. For both Borges and Lamelas, the labyrinth—a spatial chimera—serves as an epistemological model: a living puzzle through which perception continually encounters its own limits.
Installed nearby, A Study of the Relationships Between Inner and Outer Space, 1969, expands this inquiry. Produced after Lamelas’s move to London, where he studied sculpture with Anthony Caro and developed close ties with Phillip King, the video stretches the category of sculpture beyond the object. Distances between buildings, demographic distributions across neighborhoods, and the organization of the urban fabric itself become novel sculptural parameters. Lamelas’s interest lies less in invention than in the circulation of ideas—the transformation of concepts into artistic outcomes and their subsequent return to the realm of thought.
Lamelas belongs to one of the first generations of postwar, transnational artists formed within an increasingly globalized world, in which movement between nations became both materially feasible and conceptually productive—a condition that has regained urgency amid the resurgence of anti-immigration politics across the globe. Buenos Aires, London, Los Angeles, and Paris function throughout his work as more than biographical coordinates. They situate the artist within an expanded network of exchange while simultaneously reaffirming the significance of Argentine artistic production without reducing it to a national category.
For Office of Information About the Vietnam War at Three Levels: The Visual Image, Text, and Audio, 1968, a telex machine positioned atop an office desk received radio reports from the Vietnam War, which were read aloud by performers throughout the exhibition. The work was included in the 1968 Venice Biennale, an event whose current edition is likewise marked by the open wounds of ongoing wars (see Iran, Israel, Palestine, Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and Venezuela). Witnessing how the world’s most decorated event of institutionalized art metabolizes geopolitical conflagrations, oscillating between outbursts of denunciation and attitudes of neglect, is to appreciate Lamelas’s capacity to concatenate entire systems of thought in a simple operation that encompasses the urgencies of more than half a century. Office of Information also foregrounds the paradoxical repetition of singularities, reinforcing Lamelas’s proposition that the specificity of time and place embedded in his works is renewed each time they are reexhibited.
This discursive machinery links macrohistorical forces to the smallest of gestures. Geopolitical conflict and the act of pouring milk into a glass until it overflows, as we see in the video To Pour Milk into a Glass, 1972, simply emerge as different scales of the same inquiry. Across the exhibition, Lamelas repeatedly returns to problems of containment: milk within a glass, artworks within galleries, work within life, political catastrophes within the routines of everyday experience. What emerges is an interrogation of the satirical ambiguity of control itself—the persistent desire to assign stable limits to information, spaces, objects, and bodies, to establish a boundary separating inside from outside. Yet this barrier, which promises protection from contradiction and disorder, remains fundamentally fictional. Indeed, the possibility of collapse is announced immediately upon entering the exhibition in Untitled (Falling Wall), 1993/2026, in which a large panel of drywall is held upright by larch-wood supports. The leaning wall appears suspended in a perpetual state of impending free fall. It has been crumbling since the moment it was made. In Lamelas’s work, collapse rarely arrives as an event, but rather as an enduring condition.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 65, no. 1, September 2026
David Lamelas, The Machine, 2026, Dia Chelsea, New York, installation views