Upcoming Exhibitions

With each new exhibition, the Oscar Niemeyer Museum invites its public to be surprised. This time, Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora challenges our gaze and perception with his paintings, installations and sculptures made from unusual, discarded items. 

Nothing in his intense and extensive work is obvious. This includes everything from the peculiar materials he uses to the execution processes and inspiration. Everything is the result of an insight into human nature, its feelings and sensations. 

In his creative process, he transforms found objects into raw material for unique works of art, evoking the concept of ready-made. There is always a message, addressing sustainability, the passage of time and the cycle of life, translated into works full of beauty and movement.

Upon entering the exhibition room, the public is confronted not only with works of art, but with a proposal to create new meanings. By discussing universal environmental issues, he makes us realize the many possibilities that art can take on. 

The result, although the result of a process of research and study, with great technical complexity, leaves no room for predictability and sounds intuitive. We are challenged to perceive something beyond the works. And that's what this exhibition invites us to do.

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika
CEO of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum

MON holds exhibition by Mexican Gabriel de la Mora

The exhibition “Veemente”, by the Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora, is the Oscar Niemeyer Museum's (MON) newest project. The show, on display in Room 1 from May 8th, is curated by Marcello Dantas. There are 77 works, including installations, canvases with mixed techniques and sculptures, most produced between 2000 and 2025. 

The set shows not only the artist's aesthetic and its evolution, but also the diversity and peculiarity of the materials used, which go beyond traditional supports and pigments. In his creative process, he transforms found objects into raw material for unique works of art, evoking the concept of ready-made.

Gabriel de la Mora's practice involves an investigation into materials, exploring the physical and conceptual limits of a process of collection and reconstruction. At first glance, his works may seem abstract, sculptural or even minimalist. However, a closer look reveals that nothing is as it seems. De la Mora creates new and extraordinary surfaces that deconstruct the boundaries between different artistic languages.

His works are made up of unexpected elements: strands of hair, fragments of mirrors, eggshells, shoe soles, butterfly wings and other traces of everyday life. His technique denotes an almost obsessive process that transforms the raw material into new shapes, patterns and textures. The continuous repetition of the artisanal gesture - sometimes restorative, sometimes destructive - reveals a method that challenges the viewer's visual and sensory experience.

Gabriel de la Mora was born in Mexico in 1968 and surprised the art world by treating any material as an object of interest and creative power. His work aims to assign new symbolic and aesthetic values to the banal. As a collector of fragments of everyday life, he shows an unlimited fascination with the remnants of existence, putting together a puzzle that never existed.

This obsession with repetition and reconstruction is what defines the vehemence of his practice. In an exhaustive process, he seeks a visual expression that can only emerge from the infinite persistence of the gesture. 

The exhibition's expography reflects the artist's material obsessiveness by proposing an expanded sensory experience. At the Oscar Niemeyer Museum in Curitiba, a 400 m² room is filled with his works, while a large central table allows visitors to explore the materials of his creations.

The role of art is to transform the value of things - symbolic, material or imaginary. "Veemente" is an equation of visual and tactile perceptions. By allowing the public to interact with the materials and experiment with the limits of repetition and obsession, the exhibition invites each visitor to experience, in an intimate and sensory way, the logic of an artist who turns waste into visual poetry.

820 Fragments of Hypolimnas pandarus butterfly wings on museum cardboard
30 x 30 x 2 cm
Simões de Assis Gallery

Wooden sticks
28.6 x 22.3 x 15 cm
Private collection

Electronic panels on museum paper
41 x 35 x 4 cm
Private collection

Dust collected in the artist's studio
10 x 10 x 10 cm
Private collection

Acrylic on peacock feathers on museum cardboard
30 x 30 x 4 cm
Private collection

The exhibition “Veemente”, by the Mexican artist Gabriel de la Mora, is the Oscar Niemeyer Museum's (MON) newest project. The exhibition will open on May 8 in Room 1, curated by Marcello Dantas.

There are 77 works, including installations, canvases with mixed techniques and sculptures, most produced between 2000 and 2025. The set shows not only the artist's aesthetic and its evolution, but also the diversity and peculiarity of the materials used, which go beyond traditional supports and pigments. 

"Gabriel de la Mora's art provokes a fundamental reflection on our time and invites us to reframe the ordinary, to look more closely at what we have discarded or forgotten," says the Secretary of State for Culture, Luciana Casagrande Pereira. "It's an exhibition that dialogues with contemporary themes and reinforces MON's commitment to bringing the public powerful experiences connected to global art discussions."

MON's director Juliana Vosnika says that the artist challenges our gaze and perception with his paintings, installations and sculptures made from unusual, discarded items. "Nothing in his intense and extensive work is obvious. Everything is the result of an insight into human nature, its feelings and sensations," she says. 

In the process of creation, the artist transforms found objects into raw material for unique works of art, evoking the concept of ready-made. "There is always a message, addressing sustainability, the passage of time and the cycle of life, translated into works full of beauty and movement," says Juliana.

Curator Marcello Dantas explains that Gabriel de la Mora's practice involves an investigation into materials, exploring the physical and conceptual limits of a process of collection and reconstruction. "At first glance, his works may seem abstract, sculptural or even minimalist. However, a closer look reveals that nothing is as it seems," says Dantas. 

"His works are made up of unexpected elements: strands of hair, fragments of mirrors, eggshells, shoe soles, butterfly wings and other traces of everyday life," says the curator. "His technique denotes an almost obsessive process that transforms the raw material into new shapes, patterns and textures. The continuous repetition of the artisanal gesture - sometimes restorative, sometimes destructive - reveals a method that challenges the viewer's visual and sensory experience," he says.

Marcello Dantas is an award-winning curator who has worked extensively in Brazil and abroad. He works on the border between art and technology, producing exhibitions and multiple projects that provide immersive experiences through the senses and perception. In recent years, he has worked on the design of several museums, such as the Museum of the Portuguese Language, Japan House (SP), Museum of Nature (PI), Museum of the City of Manaus, Museum of the People from Sergipe (Aracaju, SE), Museum of the Caribbean and the Carnival Museum (Barranquilla, Colombia). He has held solo exhibitions of some of the world's most important names in contemporary art, such as Ai Weiwei, Anish Kapoor, Laurie Anderson, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Rebecca Horn and Tunga. He was also the artistic director of the Brazil Pavilion at Expo Shanghai 2010, the Brazil Pavilion at Rio+20 and the Pelé Station in Berlin for the 2006 World Cup.

Born in 1968 in Mexico City, where he lives and works, Gabriel de La Mora has a degree in Architecture from the University Anáhuac del Norte and has a master's degree in painting from the Pratt Institute in New York. He focuses his artistic practice on the use and reuse of discarded or obsolete objects, which seem to have completed their useful life. More interested in the deconstruction and fragmentation of an object or material over time, he bets on reconstruction from practices based on the passage of time and processes, echoing the ready-made concept.

The Oscar Niemeyer Museum (MON) is a state heritage site linked to the State Secretariat for Culture. The institution houses important references of national and international artistic production in the areas of visual arts, architecture and design, as well as large Asian and African collections. In total, the collection has approximately 14,000 works of art, housed in a space of more than 35,000 square meters, making MON the largest art museum in Latin America.

Exhibition "Veemente - Gabriel de la Mora"
Opening: May 8th, 7pm
Room 1
www.museuoscarniemeyer.org.br

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