DAMIÁN ORTEGA
Mexico City, Mexico, 1967
Director of Fundación Botín Art Workshop in 2022

Cuatro anillos concéntricos, 2019; Red Textile, 2019; Istmeñan Pattern, 2019; Huipil, 2019.
Kraft paper and cement bag cutouts
Adquired in 2022

The series of cut out works are made with cement sacks, continuing Damian’s critique of the utopian forms of modernism. Modernist architecture is inspired and based on one material, cement, which is made by calcination – an industrial process that brings a thermal decomposition of a solid material.

Cement is transported in sacks of stamped patterns that workers will sometimes recycle to make drawings, or mathematic calculations related to the job. Modern construction generates a residue of tons of paper sacks that were also used as protection from the rain or against the cold. During the sixties, it was common to see construction workers wearing a hand-made hat from the paper of the cement sacks: the paper membrane like a skin that scratches and gets wet with sweat and rain-drops.