Texts
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 at 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 at Artforum, vol. 65, no. 1, September 2026
David Lamelas, The Machine, 2026, Dia Chelsea, New York, installation views
Renata Lucas, [ ], 2014, movable exhibition panels, dimensions variable
2025. Renata Lucas
In the museum’s entrance hall, pool balls roll across the floor, with some even straying out towards the street. These surprising props result from Renata Lucas’s O Perde (The Lose, 2022): when a ball is pocketed by a visitor playing pool on the museum’s fourth floor, it travels through ducts to the ground level and emerges via a hole in the wall, confusing and extending the limits of the exhibition inside the museum itself. In contrast to a weak solo exhibition at São Paulo’s Luisa Strina last year, where only one sculpture was positioned in the center of the exhibition room – a silkscreened MDF box featuring the logo of Brazil’s largest e-commerce platform, and slightly too pleased with itself and its ironic coding of neoliberalism – Domingo no Parque (Sunday in the Park) is an engaging and joyful show.
Spending a day in a museum is nearly the opposite of spending a Sunday in the park. Here, in this retrospective-toned presentation, Lucas revisits significant works from the last two decades, which drastically intervene in the exhibition spaces and their surroundings. For Roda-gigante (Ferris Wheel, 2024), a 12m-diameter circle has been cut into the surface of the little park in front of the Pinacoteca, its elements – the pavement, the earth of the garden and the kerb – appearing to have been rotated. Lucas played the same disorientating trick at Berlin’s KW 15 years ago, and the specificity of these works to their original exhibition spaces – such as Berlin’s Neugerriemschneider and KW – encourages reading the exhibition as a 1:1 model. Rubbing against the notion of site-specific, Lucas reformulates most of the previously executed works, keeping their original conceptual principles and material aspects but adjusting them to the new space. At Pinacoteca, the radical – and expensive – decision was made to build a new plywood platform over the original floor, covering the vast 900 sqm across all the rooms.
This is Falha (Failure, 2003/2024), in which the whole floor of one vast gallery is covered with plywood panels connected by hinges and fitted with handles, with which museumgoers can create new spatial configurations, effortfully folding and unfolding the heavy panels. While the work invokes the artist’s oft-stated anti-neoliberal focus on unproductive action, it also echoes fellow Brazilian Lygia Clark’s explorations of folding space and audience participation during the 1960s. [ ] (2014) features pivoting walls that, when turned by visitors, spin and play vinyl records embedded in the floor. The speed of the wall’s rotation, at the visitor’s control, determines the music’s tempo and intelligibility.
Despite their conceptual acuity, some accidents seemed to happen without purpose in the interactive works, suggesting technical unpreparedness. In O Perde, some of the billiard balls jumped out of the long channel that would guide them across the floor to enter the downward chute, forcing a museum staffer to pick them up and replace them. In [ ], the vinyl did not always play when the pivotal wall was rotated, leaving some visitors with a sense of frustration about their interactions. These works are intended to work, not to incorporate unplanned malfunctions. In hindsight, I realized that these technical contretemps highlighted the challenge faced by the institution for works that demand such active maintenance. But in this, too, the artist manages to point out, with sharp irony, how such flaws reveal the limits of the museum in dealing with her work’s challenge to the idea of its function.
Text originally published at ArtReview, March 2025
Spending a day in a museum is nearly the opposite of spending a Sunday in the park. Here, in this retrospective-toned presentation, Lucas revisits significant works from the last two decades, which drastically intervene in the exhibition spaces and their surroundings. For Roda-gigante (Ferris Wheel, 2024), a 12m-diameter circle has been cut into the surface of the little park in front of the Pinacoteca, its elements – the pavement, the earth of the garden and the kerb – appearing to have been rotated. Lucas played the same disorientating trick at Berlin’s KW 15 years ago, and the specificity of these works to their original exhibition spaces – such as Berlin’s Neugerriemschneider and KW – encourages reading the exhibition as a 1:1 model. Rubbing against the notion of site-specific, Lucas reformulates most of the previously executed works, keeping their original conceptual principles and material aspects but adjusting them to the new space. At Pinacoteca, the radical – and expensive – decision was made to build a new plywood platform over the original floor, covering the vast 900 sqm across all the rooms.
This is Falha (Failure, 2003/2024), in which the whole floor of one vast gallery is covered with plywood panels connected by hinges and fitted with handles, with which museumgoers can create new spatial configurations, effortfully folding and unfolding the heavy panels. While the work invokes the artist’s oft-stated anti-neoliberal focus on unproductive action, it also echoes fellow Brazilian Lygia Clark’s explorations of folding space and audience participation during the 1960s. [ ] (2014) features pivoting walls that, when turned by visitors, spin and play vinyl records embedded in the floor. The speed of the wall’s rotation, at the visitor’s control, determines the music’s tempo and intelligibility.
Despite their conceptual acuity, some accidents seemed to happen without purpose in the interactive works, suggesting technical unpreparedness. In O Perde, some of the billiard balls jumped out of the long channel that would guide them across the floor to enter the downward chute, forcing a museum staffer to pick them up and replace them. In [ ], the vinyl did not always play when the pivotal wall was rotated, leaving some visitors with a sense of frustration about their interactions. These works are intended to work, not to incorporate unplanned malfunctions. In hindsight, I realized that these technical contretemps highlighted the challenge faced by the institution for works that demand such active maintenance. But in this, too, the artist manages to point out, with sharp irony, how such flaws reveal the limits of the museum in dealing with her work’s challenge to the idea of its function.
Text originally published at ArtReview, March 2025
Renata Lucas, Sunday in the Park, 2025, Pinacoteca, São Paulo, installation views