artnexus #112

In his work, Gabriel Sierra (1975, San Juan Nepomuceno, Bolívar, Colombia) puts to good use the two disciplines in which he was trained: art and industrial design. Moreover, he is able to bring both fields into a dialog, exploiting to great advantage the contributions of two areas of knowledge that often move in different directions. The diversity of Sierra’s works reveals an ability to adapt to the most varied materials, and considerable resourcefulness in handling precarious situations and manipulating common elements regarded as inappropriate for consumption. Thus his wide-ranging practice, which employs several different techniques: sculpture, writing, performance, and spatial interventions. The austerity of many of his objects and his interest in a thoughtful exploration seek to critique consumerist excesses. The dialogs that occur in the spatial interventions Sierra proposes to illuminate a possible relationship between architecture, art, and design. Along those lines, the gallery space becomes a place for exploration, and the viewer/environment relationship is reformulated. Sierra shows how certain habits of interaction with a given environment, in this case, an art gallery, can be shifted depending on how the architectural structure is intervened; he explores the relationship between reality and perception by probing how architectural forms influence our behavior and the memory of a space. The installation on our cover, Estructura para transición # 18 (Structure For Transition #18), attests to Sierra’s interest in recognizing an intervened architecture, for those who observe it, as a container of space, time, and memory. 

 IVONNE PINI