Casey Kaplan

MAIN GALLERY Jan 20, 2017 – Mar 19, 2017

Mateo López
Undo List

Mateo López: Undo List is a multidisciplinary installation that will be the Colombian artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States and that will feature works on paper, sculpture, performance, and projected film. Trained as an architect in his native Bogotá, López has long used drawing as a conceptual tool to cross disciplines and aesthetic categories. Drawing is more than an artistic medium for López; it is a way of conceiving and indeed inhabiting the world. Simple drawn constructions that can be manipulated in various ways; trompe l’oeil paper renderings of two and three dimensional objects (for example, near-exact replicas of lined sheets of paper); drawings made out of the leftovers produced by cutting into other works—these are just some of the devices López uses to reveal that, as he says himself, just as everything manufactured was at one point a drawing, so too, “an image is not flat; it is an atmosphere, it contains time and space.”

Organized by Claire Gilman, Senior Curator

Mateo López: Undo List is made possible by the support of the Rolex Institute, Estrellita Brodsky, Ana Sokoloff, and Ann and Marshall Webb. Additional support is provided by the Embassy of Colombia in the United States through the Promotion Plan of Colombia Abroad of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colombia.

Additional thanks to: Travesía Cuatro; Giorgio Griffa and Casey Kaplan, New York; Galeria Luisa Strina; and Casas Riegner.

The Drawing Center gives special thanks to the Rolex Institute for helping to support Mateo López’s Undo List exhibition. The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative is aimed at ensuring that the world’s artistic heritage is passed on from generation to generation and across continents and cultures. The Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative helps rising young artists achieve their full potential by pairing them with great masters for a year of intense one-to-one collaboration. Since 2002, Rolex has brought together a total of 50 mentor and protégé pairs in the fields of architecture, dance, film, literature, music, theatre and visual arts to participate in this unique creative exchange. In the 2012-2013 series of the philanthropic program, Colombian artist Mateo López worked with acclaimed South African visual artist William Kentridge, who helped him expand the scope of his innovative drawings and installations.