GABRIEL DE LA MORA’S SURFACES OF DESIRE AT MUSEO JUMEX

Museo Jumex presents Gabriel de la Mora: La Petite Mort, a comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s practice over the past two decades, opening on September 25, 2025. The exhibition brings together nearly ninety works with minimalist and often monochromatic surfaces that contain great technical complexity, conceptual rigor, and implicit information.

Born in Mexico City in 1968, Gabriel de la Mora is known for transforming found, discarded, and obsolete materials through seemingly alchemical processes into exquisite objects with brilliant and seductive finishes. Installed in the museum’s third-floor gallery, the exhibition investigates the recurring presence of desire and eroticism in De la Mora’s practice, addressing both the surface tension of the works and the deeper unconscious creative impulses that govern them. An implicit sense of loss also permeates the artist’s production—a symbolic or physical death often manifested through the materials he employs.

Co-organized by Museo Jumex and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO), La Petite Mort is curated by guest curator Tobias Ostrander, with curatorial assistant Carolina Estrada García from Museo Jumex.

Structured around six thematic sections—Bodies, Erasure, Heat, The Edge of Desire, Touch, and The Viewer’s Pleasure—the exhibition explores two central concerns in De la Mora’s work: death itself and ecstatic sexual pleasure. The title La Petite Mort refers to a French expression meaning “orgasm” or “the little death.” The exhibition focuses on these concepts and on related notions of loss and abandonment that run throughout De la Mora’s practice. By examining the physical encounters between the works and their viewers, La Petite Mort acknowledges the conceptual complexities of the exhibition while questioning its aesthetic purity and objective beauty.

Bodies, the first of the six sections, presents works that explore human and inanimate bodies through portraiture, physical presence, and transferred impressions. Erasure highlights works that include images and materials whose original state has been altered, either through the artist’s direct intervention in the form of physical abrasion or through the recontextualization of found materials deteriorated by use, the passage of time, or wear. Heat focuses on works shaped by fire, both as a material process and as a metaphor for physical intensity. The Edge of Desire emphasizes De la Mora’s fascination with edges, cuts, and boundaries, as well as the tension between surface and depth. Touch gathers works that trace the evidence and absence of physical contact, including the artist’s first work, m-294 (1972), which he created at the age of four.

The exhibition concludes with The Viewer’s Pleasure, a section that directly references Roland Barthes’s influential 1973 essay The Pleasure of the Text, highlighting the active role of the spectator in works of art. These works invite participation and interaction, whether through texts that demand to be read, surfaces marked in ways that call to be deciphered, or references to eyes and reflective surfaces that implicate the viewer in the act of looking.

Gabriel de la Mora: La Petite Mort will be on view from September 25, 2025, through February 8, 2026, at Museo Jumex, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 303, Colonia Granada, Mexico City (Mexico).