David Lamelas (b. 1946, Buenos Aires, Argentina) is widely recognized as a pioneer of conceptual art. Ranging from sculpture to film, photography, and performance, his interdisciplinary practice has influenced artists across the Americas and Europe. A key member of the Argentinean avant-garde during the 1960s, Lamelas participated in landmark exhibitions in Buenos Aires and showed frequently at the influential Instituto Torcuato di Tella, an experimental space directed by critic and theorist Jorge Romero Brest. Published on the occasion of his first solo exhibition in the American Midwest, David Lamelas: Fiction of a Production focuses on early sculptures and site-specific works that analyze and deconstruct architectural space, repositioning sculpture as a relationship between place, space, and time. With bilingual (English/Spanish) essays by Jean-François Chevrier, David Lamelas and Raúl Escari, Kristina Newhouse, and Carla Acevedo-Yates, exhibition curator, the book offers an insightful look at the artist’s early sculptural practice in Argentina and its development into architectural interventions and film. Included alongside the aforementioned essays are installation images of the exhibition, including works that are specific to the Zaha-Hadid designed museum, and reproductions of sketches from the 1960s of unrealized artworks that evidence the artist’s approach to drawing as a conceptual exercise.
