Contemplating is How We Have Been Changing
TABAKALERA. INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURE, San Sebastián
25 October 2024 – 2 February 2025

Contemplating is How We Have Been Changing is the first exhibition promoted by an institution dedicated to the Argentinean artist Gabriel Chaile (San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina, 1985) which brings together his entire career, from his beginnings to his current practice in his studio in Lisbon.

Chaile’s body of work is mostly in the form of sculpture, although it also coexists naturally with drawing and installations, in which tradition, memory and identity are combined in pieces charged with meaning. His artistic practice, which begins with drawing and the found object, leads him to sculpture in materials such as adobe, clay or metal, which he bestows with a symbolic force that transcends the merely visual.

Gabriel Chaile is one of the most recognisable artists in contemporary sculpture thanks to his monumental adobe pieces, which evoke the morphology of the pre-Columbian ceramics of the La Candelaria culture, close to his native region. Today, Chaile continues to investigate and deploy ancestral techniques in order to construct alternative narratives that invite us to rethink the relationship between the past and the present, between the individual and the collective.

The exhibition also makes reference to the collective way of working in Gabriel Chaile’s studio. Based in Lisbon since the pandemic, his studio is home to a group of artists who combine their own individual practice with that of the collective. This is why the exhibition involves the participation of a member of the team, Tomás Bargão, who, invited by Chaile, contributes to it with a newly produced piece.