Since the 1960s, David Lamelas has been among the most important proponents of a conceptual approach to art. Especially his early structuralist films and media installations, made when he was living in Belgium, London, and Los Angeles in the sixties and seventies, display a highly individual treatment of time and space. In his projects, Lamelas deals impressively with the question of the limits of art's temporality and its potential for creating alternative processes of communication and cognition.

Lamelas' interest manifests itself in a definition of art that is not local or national but immaterial. Space is not measured in geographical dimensions but considered solely in terms of its intellectual and transnational scope.

For Parra & Romero, Lamelas will devise a site-specific intervention which will temporarily redefine the determinants of time and space, defined via a conceptual structure. (Spatial) ... volume is transferred into (film) time.

Lamelas will show The Light at the Edge of a Nightmare, five projections made over several years in five different geographic locations. The selected film locations - Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Berlin, London, and Paris - correspond with Lamelas' biography as he has lived in all five cities. In each case, the subject of the film noir is a love affair between a man and woman that concludes with a murder scene, in which the man dies.

It describes an eternally returning episode, referring equally to the temporality of the urban and to major narrative themes and gestures of Hollywood productions.

David Lamelas deals here with the reconsideration of his own work by means of the continuation of early series such as Time as Activity (2004) in new cities, as well as return to the analysis of the exhibition space in the installation of some of his first interventions.

In parallel with the film, David Lamelas undertakes in another piece an almost visionary study of the relations between space, time, and place. A vinyl text on the wall says In this space two people can't find each other (2011) and at the edges of the sentence, two desynchronized clocks are placed with a blank space in between. The installation (and his work in general terms) rejects the supposed neutrality of minimalist practice in clearly critical terms, with particular emphasis placed by the artist on examining the concept of the artwork itself in relation to the role of the author and the viewer.

Rather than contenting himself with viewing the artist simply as a political subject or intensifying this role, Lamelas creates spaces for a process of critical analysis that eschews moralizing. With his works, he pursues recurring motifs whose almost singular orthodoxy, embedded in the language of modernity, express a great analytical will and a sense of imagination and utopia.

DAVID LAMELAS, born in 1946 in Buenos Aires, lives and works in Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and Paris.

SOLO SHOWS (selection):

2012 Signalling. Ignacio Liprandi Arte Contemporanea, Buenos Aires; 2012 Proyección. Jan Mot, México D.F; 2011 Comma36, Bloomberg Space, London; 2009 David Lamelas. Sprüth Magers, Berlin; 2007 David Lamelas. Time As Activity, St. Gallen Neue Kunst Halle; 2006 David Lamelas. Tiempo como actividad, Malba - Museo de Arte Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires; 2006 David Lamelas. Part 1 and Part 2, Galerie Jan Mot, Brussels; 2005 David Lamelas: foreigner, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; 2004 David Lamelas: Exhibiting Mediality, ICA, Philadelphia; David Lamelas: SPACE/TIME/FICTION, Sala Rekalde, Bilbao; Time as Activity.

Warsaw / Czas jako dzialanie. Warszawa, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw; 2003 David Lamelas - Edge I+II, Galerie Kienzle & Gmeiner, Berlin.

GROUP SHOWS (selection):

2013 (Forthcoming) Glam! Tate, Liverpool; 2010 David Lamelas, David Maljkovic, 29th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo; 2010 Changing Channels, MUMOK, Museum moderner kunst stitfung Ludwig wien; 2009 Sources Codes, Sprüth Magers Berlin; 2008 Above-the-Fold, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel; 2006 The Expanded Eye, Kunsthaus Zürich; LOS ANGELES 1955-1985, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Thank You For The Music, Sprüth Magers Galerie, Munich; FRAC. Mouvement, Museum Ludwig, Cologne; 2005 Today is just a copy of yesterday, Galerie Jan Mot, Brussels; behind the facts, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form 1940s-70s, Miami Art Museum; 2004 3. berlin biennale 2004, Berlin; The Last Picture Show, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; X-Screen, MUMOK, Vienna; 2003 The Last Picture Show: Photography, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; 2001 doublelife, Generali Foundation, Vienna.