11 Jan 2017

Financial Architectures: Arturo Ortiz-Struck at Chalton Gallery, London

Chalton Gallery is delighted to present the first exhibition in the UK of Mexican Artist Arturo Ortiz-Struck, 'Financial Architectures'. The exhibition features works from the last fifteen years including photography, video, newspaper and topographic archives, artist books, and three-dimensional paintings. The show also includes various ready-mades and appropriated objects reflecting on the social life of money and the spatial traces left by accelerated financial flows.

The work of Arturo Ortiz-Struck is a visual and spatial investigation of suburban life in Mexico and the forms of intimacy that it allows. Working with multiple media, it renders visible expressions of spatial violence affecting the urban poor, in particular those resulting from the entanglement of housing and financial markets. Having worked for decades as architect in informal settlements located in the peripheries of Mexico City, Ortiz's research-led art investigates how processes of abstraction and planning condition the forms life, leisure, mobility, and death in the suburbs. In order to portray geographies of hope and disenchantment, desire and decay, the artist combines the use of prosthetic visual technologies with elements of design. His gaze is also shaped by a return to the Situationist dérive, whereupon chance and the affective dimensions of space shed light on what has been left void, forgotten, and occult in today's financialized models of mass-scale housing.

Curated by Mara Polgovsky.