DAMIÁN ORTEGA
Oct 15, 2010 - Jan 23, 2011 to 12:00am talk/event
The next commission in The Curve will be an ambitious installation by acclaimed Mexican artist Damián Ortega. For 31 days Ortega has set himself the challenge of creating a new sculpture over 24 hours. Each sculpture will be inspired by an item culled from the newspaper of that day: whether a news story, a photograph, or a graphic. Over the calendar month the works will accumulate in the gallery to become both a sculptural chronicle of a particular period of time – and a dynamic reinterpretation of the notion of an art commission.
 
Damián Ortega is one of the leading sculptors of his generation. His Barbican commission follows important solo shows at ICA Boston (2009) and Centre Pompidou (2008), White Cube (2007) and Tate Modern (2005). He began his career as a political cartoonist before he turned to art, and the development of his characteristically ‘mischievous process of transformation and dysfunction’.
 
Damián Ortega was born in 1967 in Mexico City and currently works and lives in Berlin, Germany.
Free admission

OMA/PROGRESS
Oct 6, 2011 - Feb 19, 2012
OMA/Progress profiles one of today's most influential architecture firms.
Opening up the west entrance to the Art Gallery for the first time, the show features an eloquent display of select materials from its offices worldwide and its archive in the Netherlands (dating from the 1970s) that reveals a complex attitude towards the notion of progress, within architecture and beyond.
The exhibition is guest curated by Rotor.

SONG DONG : WASTE NOT
Feb 15 - Jun 12, 2012
New commission for The Curve gallery. A meditation on family life and the artist’ own childhood during the Cultural Revolution, the installation comprises over 10,000 items collected by Song Dong’s mother over five decades - ranging from a section of the house to metal pots and plastic bowls to blankets, bottle caps, toothpaste tubes and toys. The activity of saving and reusing things is in keeping with the Communist adage wu jin qu yong – ‘waste not’ – a prerequisite for survival during periods of social and political turmoil.