Delcy Morelos, for “Delcy Morelos: El abrazo” at the Dia Art Foundation, New York
October 5, 2023–July 20, 2024
With her large-scale sculptures composed primarily of earth, Delcy Morelos has filled entire rooms with large-scale installations that explore how humans relate to the land they walk upon. Soil, hay, cinnamon, and cloves recur in these transportive pieces, which are variously intended to communicate cosmovisions and channel altered states. Often monumental in size and spare in their aesthetic, her sculptures recall Minimalist art of the 1960s and ’70s, though they also draw directly from the knowledge and aesthetics of Indigenous Amazonian cultures.
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All of this made Morelos a natural fit for the Dia Art Foundation, which began as a haven for Minimalist and Conceptualist art five decades ago. In recent years, Dia director Jessica Morgan has made it one of her stated goals to diversify the foundation’s offerings, to account for forms of Minimalism beyond the ones already ensconced in the Western canon. Morelos, who was born in the Colombian town of Tierralta and is now based in the capital city of Bogotá, responded to the Minimalism already abundant in Dia’s collection, cleverly repositioning the cold industrial-grade forms in art by Richard Serra, Robert Morris, Walter De Maria, and more.
De Maria’s New York Earth Room (1977) was one of the primary reference points for the two works on view, El abrazo and Cielo terrenal (both 2023). The latter work consisted of black clay sourced from the Hudson Valley, which she painted onto the walls and floor of the museum; discarded objects from past Dia shows also figured here. Plunged into near darkness, viewers were presented with an excavation site of sorts. El abrazo, meanwhile, consisted of a towering mound of recycled soil mixed with hay and coir. Viewers could walk into a triangular area cut out of the work’s center, then breathe in the earthy aroma. Unlike most museum presentations, which discourage more intimate forms of contact with art, viewers were explicitly told that they could run their hands across El abrazo.
In that way, these two installations privileged a kind of viewing that was sensual. An accompanying booklet for the show reminded viewers that “to touch the earth is to be touched by her.” In visiting this exhibition, viewers walked away with a deeper sense of the world around them.
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