Carlos Motta

Provenance: Courtesy of the Artist

Marrying themes of mortality, performed identity, and sexual alterity to discussions of Western imperialism, the work seeks to draw parallels between two important voices in contemporary art, Carlos Motta and David Wojnarowicz.

Carlos Motta (b. 1978) was born in Bogotá, Colombia and lives and works in New York City. He received his MFA from Bard College (2003) and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program (2006). Motta has been the subject of survey exhibitions including Carlos Motta: Formas de libertad at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín, Colombia (2017), Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile (2018), and Carlos Motta: For Democracy There Must Be Love, Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden (2015). His work was recently acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and is in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Barcelona; Museu Fundaçao Serralves, Porto; and Museo de Arte de Banco de la República, Bogotá; among others. Motta has been awarded the Vilcek Foundation’s Prize for Creative Promise (2017); the PinchukArtCentre’s Future Generation Art Prize (2014); and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2008). The Crossing, Motta’s video installation commissioned by The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam will be included in the Institute of Contemporary Art’s, Boston group exhibition, When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art, opening in the fall of 2019 and traveling to the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. A comprehensive monograph of Motta’s work with essay contributions from Hendrik Folkerts, Andrea Giunta, Miguel A. López, and Agustín Pérez Rubio will be published by SKIRA in the spring of 2020.