David Lamelas: The Machine

David Lamelas: The Machine is a comprehensive survey exhibition of the Argentine artist’s work and his first major solo presentation in New York. A foundational yet overlooked figure of 1960s and ’70s art, Lamelas has produced paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, performances, and films, bridging Conceptual, Minimalist, and Pop approaches to art making. Over six decades, he has created a diverse body of work while living across Buenos Aires, London, Los Angeles, and Paris, among other locations, developing a nomadic sensibility that profoundly shaped his practice.  
 
The exhibition at Dia Chelsea comprises three parts—a presentation, a film program, and a performance series. Preceding the exhibition, the performance series begins with 1416 m3 (2014), performed in the galleries on February 10. The piece, scored by composer Gavin Gamboa following Lamelas’s concept, uses sound and voice to represent volumetric and metaphysical space, functioning as an immersive prelude to the installation. Opening on March 6, the nonlinear presentation in the main galleries emphasizes key moments from the artist’s career, surveying 1965 to the present through a wide range of works, among them recent additions to Dia’s collection, such as the especially commissioned Situación de tiempo II (Situation of Time II, 2025). In parallel, the films in the program space further expand the physical dimension of the exhibition, illustrating the breadth of the artist’s moving-image practice from the mid-1970s to 2020s, and unfolding in four chapters. Together, The Machine’s multiple parts reveal Lamelas’s lifelong preoccupations with information and communications, and how they are mediated by the viewer’s perception.

About the artist

David Lamelas was born in Buenos Aires in 1946. Influenced by the formal considerations of Conceptual, Minimalist, and Pop art, through his works Lamelas mediates on themes of time, the circulation of information, and the conditions of the exhibition space. He completed a BA in sculpture at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires and became a key figure of the avant-garde movement that emerged in Argentina during the 1960s. Lamelas participated in foundational group exhibitions at the Instituto Torcuato di Tella, a historic experimental-art foundation in Buenos Aires, and represented Argentina at the São Paulo Biennial (1967) and the Venice Biennale (1968). In 1968, Lamelas received a British Arts Council Fellowship, enabling him to move to London and study at Central Saint Martins, subsequently participating in formative exhibitions of Conceptual art in Europe and the United States. In the mid-1970s, he relocated to Los Angeles to produce filmic works that integrated Hollywood tropes and analyzed the production of cinema. Major solo presentations include A New Refutation of Time, Witte de With Rotterdam (now Kunstinstituut Melly, 1997); A Life of Their Own, University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach (2017), which toured to the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2018); Fiction of a Production, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University, East Lansing (2018–19); and Life as Activity, Hunter College Art Galleries, New York (2021). Lamelas lives in Buenos Aires and Los Angeles.