“Magnetic Field,” a sculpture by world-renowned artist Damián Ortega, is the latest addition to Claremont McKenna College’s Walker Collection of Public Art. Ortega lives and works in Mexico City.
Suspended approximately 30 feet in the atrium of CMC’s new Robert Day Sciences Center, the work is comprised of 18 rings of stainless-steel round bar, a stainless-steel sphere, and 1,476 colorful glass spheres of various sizes.
The work depicts a “diagram of the Earth’s magnetic field—a shield that protects the planet from solar storms and its potent radiation, thus enabling life to thrive on our planet.”
As he and his studio team assembled and installed the sculpture, Ortega said he felt energized to not only have his work join such a prestigious campus collection, but to help “create an identity” for the innovative building that will house the College’s Kravis Department of Integrated Sciences.
“I’m excited to be part of a new enterprise, a new project with completely new energy, with a new building … and especially the new program,” he said.
The installation of “Magnetic Field” is a significant moment as the College celebrates the opening of the Robert Day Sciences Center at a special public gathering and ribbon cutting on Sept. 26.
Public viewing of the sculpture is accessible during normal building operating hours.
About the Artist
Damián Ortega (b. 1967, Mexico City) deconstructs familiar objects and processes with a witty sense of humor, altering their functions and transforming them into novel experiences and scenarios. His work plays with a scale that ranges from the molecular to the cosmic. As the art critic Guy Brett says, Ortega combines the cosmic with the accidental, applying the concepts of physics to human interactions where chaos, accidents, and instability produce a system of relations in flux. By inverting and dissecting, reconfiguring and zooming in, he explores the tension that underlies every object and its own infinite world. The result of his inquiries reveals the interdependence of many different components: either within a complex engineered machine or a social system. Ortega outlines the concepts of his projects through drawing, and then they shift into sculpture, installation, performance, film, and photography. For Ortega, the work of art is always an action: an event. His experiments inhabit a space where possibility and the everyday converge to activate a transcendent new way of looking at simple objects and routine interactions.
Ortega began his career as a political cartoonist and participated in Gabriel Orozco’s workshop, Taller de los viernes, from 1987 to 1992. In 2005, he was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize, and in 2007, he was nominated for the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst. In 2014, he received the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution, and in 2006, he participated in an artist residency at Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) in Berlin.
One of Ortega’s most important projects is Alias Editorial, a publishing imprint that he established in 2006. The imprint publishes essential and fundamental texts within contemporary art that are out of print or have not been translated into Spanish, as well as new texts and interviews with artists with whom he collaborates. Thanks to the simple style of the editions, Alias makes the texts affordable and accessible to the public.
Ortega lives and works in Mexico City.
Read full CV here.