Presented by Ronnen Fine Art, this exhibition includes recent work by the Bogotá-based artist Mateo López (b. 1978). On view is a selection of works on paper, collage, and sculpture that display the artist’s dynamic practice of “expanded drawing.”

With the training and perspective of an architect, López views drawing as a constructive medium; as a way for us to imagine, build, and travel through the world. More than just line on paper, his practice of “expanded drawing” extends into multiple physical dimensions including (most recently) performance and video. In some instances, this has involved moving his studio out into the world, documenting cross-country travels that reconstructing historical, fictional, or personal narratives.

These works similarly refer to themes of movement and the language of shared narratives. A number of throughlines and themes can be drawn across the works presented. Compositions from 2018 and 2021 share a similar visual style, arranging paperboard, line drawing, and selected phrases from texts important to the artist. By abstracting them from their original contexts—which range from an architectural textbook to protest signs—their connotations are playfully surreptitious. Similar references to Modernist design and architecture, like the silhouette of Le Corbusier’s “Modular Man” in Mask II (2021), are wittily reimagined through optical illusions. This is only possible because of López’s deft and sensitive command of geometric forms and space, allowing viewers to see how perception can shift with a small change in perspective.

Mateo López (b. 1978) is an artist who lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia. Trained as an architect, López applies the methodical approach of drafting into a practice he calls “expanded drawing,” realizing line and its paper substrates beyond two-dimensional space. Drawing, for López, is a medium that enables travel through conceptual themes such as play, chance, time, personal narratives and history. In his collage work, for example, López uses mixed media common to an architectural studio—paperboard, grommets, planes, textbooks, cartographies—in dialogue with organic forms and contemporary movements in Latin American politics. His recent work conducts the gestures and corporality of drawing in three-dimensional space through sculpture, moving image, and performance, inviting audience participation and engagement in a nod to the Neo-Concrete and Conceptual movements of the 20th century.

His work has been exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions at the Sin Principio / Sin Final Museo de Arte Universidad Nacional, Bogotá, Colombia (2018); The Drawing Center, New York, USA (2017); Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore, Ireland (2016); and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain (2009). He has been in several important group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2015) and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013) where his work was acquired for the permanent collection.