David Lamelas (Buenos Aires, 1946) lives and works in Los Angeles, Nice and Buenos Aires.
He studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Buenos Aires and was one of the leaders of the avant-garde movement which was formed at the Torcuato di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires. In 1967 his “Dos Espacios Modifcados” earned him the prize for sculpture at the IX Bienal de São Paulo. In 1968 he represented Argentina at the 34th Venice Biennale with “Offce of Information about the Vietnam War at Three Levels: The Visual Image, Text and Audio”. The work earned him critical recognition and he moved from Buenos Aires to London, where he studied at St. Martin’s School of the Arts. Here he began to work on formally reduced installations that used abstract sculptural and architectural dimensions to investigate the surrounding exhibition space. The material and temporal conditions of lived existence are often referenced in Lamelas’ photography and film, and feature contrived representations of time and movement.
In 1969, he premiered his film “Time as Experimental Activity in Prospect ’69” at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. In 1972 he participated in Documenta 5 in Kassel, directed by Harald Szeemann and again in Documenta 14 in 2017. His numerous solo exhibitions include, most recently, those at the MSU Broad Museum (2018), University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach (2017), MALBA, Buenos Aires (2017), Tate Modern, London (2016), Kunsthalle, Basel (2014); Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2013); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2008); Wien Secession, Wien (2006); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2005); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2000).
He was awarded Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993.
The monography “David Lamelas. A Life of Their Own” was published in 2018.
