Nicolás Lamas
Nicolás Lamas (b. 1980, Lima, Peru; lives and works in Brussels, Belgium) engages in a cross-disciplinary practice that merges sculptural experimentation with conceptual inquiry. Drawing from science, archaeology, digital culture, and everyday materials, he constructs assemblages that unsettle habitual ways of seeing the material world.
His work proposes an alternate space in which objects are not passive, but charged with agency, blending traces of the ancient and the contemporary to create environments where time folds and meaning flickers—speculative spaces in which form, function, and perception are constantly renegotiated.
Nothing is really stable or permanent. Things transform and decay at different rates despite their apparent inactivity. Energy is always being transmitted and released as matter changes form and physical state. Everything is in transition to another state or material level. In that sense, the boundaries between the living and the inert, the organic and the synthetic, nature and culture, the material and the virtual, the unique and the collective or the human and the non-human become blurred. Animals, people, plants, insects, bacteria, digital information and goods of all kinds, are constantly circulating around the world, affecting the world and leaving different types of traces in their path throughout their existence. Although we can’t perceive certain changes and movements, everything is on the move in a great flow of energy and information within a large holistic system, like a large organism, swarm or assemblage where everything seems to be interconnected to some extent. [excerpt from an interview between the artist and Anna Karpenko, originally published on saliva.live, 2021].
Nicolás Lamas‘ most recent solo exhibitions were at the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent (2021), and at FORMat in Amsterdam (2023). His works have also been shown at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (MUMOK) in Vienna (2022), MAAT Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon (2022), HOW ART Museum in Shanghai (2022), MAK – Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna (2021), Kunsthal in Ghent (2021) and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2020).
