Gabriel Moreno (b 1992) is a Mexican-American artist living in Chicago, IL. His work spans sculpture, installation, and image-making and is often composed of found materials, including wood, refrigerators, archival images, and cultural ephemera. Rooted in a design and craft background, his work assumes sociality is the wellspring for materiality. As such he makes and studies objects in order to look to these sources.
His recent work has explored the effects and transformations of the negative: the effects of extracting midwestern industrial economies, sculpture’s historical tendency towards categorical negativity, and musing on what's left after "the end." He relies on the immediacy of objects to explore notions of distance, routinely returning to the tensions tieing individuality and collectivity. His work responds to the manifold embedding of objects, spaces, and places in each other.
His work has been exhibited at Produce Model Gallery (Chicago, IL), Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (Chicago, IL), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Chicago, IL), The Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL), EXPO Chicago 2016, The Figge Art Museum (Davenport, IA), Randy Alexander Gallery (Chicago, IL), Galesburg Historical Society (Galesburg, IL), Weinberg-Newton Gallery (Chicago, IL), Trinity College (Palos Heights, IL) and has been featured in the 2018 Chicago Humanities Festival. Residencies include ACRE’s Artist In Residence program in August 2018, the Hyde Park Art Center Residency in 2016-2017, and the Chautauqua School of Art in 2013.
He holds an MFA in Visual Art from The University of Chicago (2016), and BA’s in Studio Art and Art History from Knox College (2014).
Recent collaborations have been with Rick Lowe’s Black Wall Street Journey, Atlas Unlimited with Artist Karthik Pandian and Choreographer Andros Zins-Browne, Terrain Biennial, Goddamn, and Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation.
Signing the Block Club Imaginary by Gabriel Moreno
A “spectacle of entrance, exits, and changing coalitions” by Solveig Nelson
At The Edge of The Sea by Zachary Cahill
gabriel.granat@gmail.com