Caballero Alto (2023)

Caballero Alto (2023), first shown during Frieze Art Fair in 2023, is a stark white inflatable tower, with the humming white noise of its air pump. Deceivingly playful in appearance, the work was inspired by the watchtower of Mexico City’s Chapultepec Castle, the site of a bloody battle between Mexico and America in 1847.

Caballero Alto brings together many themes present throughout Delmar’s work, highlighting how colonialism, capitalism, and conceptualism have come together with their own expression in her birthplace of Mexico.

Débora Delmar’s work investigates the effects of globalisation on everyday life focusing on issues of class, gender, cultural hegemony and gentrification. This is borne from the omnipresent influence of the United States in Mexico (Delmar’s place of birth), and in the wider world. Within her practice she examines the contextual value of goods, analysing their systems of production, distribution and consumption. In her installations Delmar frequently references the sanitised aesthetic utilised in non-spaces, a neologism coined by sociologist Marc Augé to describe places such as banks, airports as well as corporate and government buildings, which are commonly under surveillance. She’s particularly interested in the psychological and behavioural influence of this kind of architecture. Physical barriers working as metaphors for political and societal restrictions have been a recurrent subject matter in recent projects. Delmar often works with appropriated images and objects, as well as with local production processes and direct architectural interventions. She frequently incorporates immaterial components within her exhibitions such as video, text, sound, scent, and situations.

Selected exhibitions include Body Blend Trade Culture, Museo Universitario del Chopo, MX, 2014, Upward Mobility, Modern Art Oxford, UK, 2015; 9th Berlin Biennial, DE, 2016; Biennial of the Americas, US, 2016; and more recently Femsa Biennial, Michoacán, MX, 2020-2021. She has received numerous grants such as the Jumex Museum Scholarship, MX, 2016-2018; Red Mansion Art Prize, UK/CN ,2018; and the Wolfson College Cambridge RA Graduate Prize, UK, 2019. Upcoming solo exhibitions include LIBERTY., Galleria Pìu, Bologna, IT, 2022 and TBC, Llano, Mexico City, MX, 2023.