DALLAS – For the Dallas Art Fair, Gallery Diet presents three new sculptures by Nicolas Lobo. The works continue Lobo’s Bio-Foam Aluminum Pour series, for which he uses Bio-Foam, a medical casting material, to create a mold for aluminum pours. To produce these sculptures, Lobo makes impressions in the Bio-Foam surface, then pours molten aluminum onto the design—the grid of material that would have been used to cast a limb is now subsumed and partly destroyed in the pour of recycled metal. The Bio-Foam is not entirely removed by the process, due to its moisture-proof and temperature-resistant nature—it remains in solidified hunks and as patina on the aluminum, revealing the surface impressions and the objects that made them.
Where the industrial intwines with the biological, friction occurs in the materials involved—industrial metal, medical products, and consumer goods. Using the Bio-Foam as a casting material, Lobo imprints objects that come from the body-based economy—energy drinks, seen in the tab-tops of Red Bull cans; athletic body-optimization, displayed in the outline of Gatorade bottles and a strip of carbon fiber; and body ornamentation, present in the powder of L’Oréal make-up and the logo of a Versace belt buckle’s Medusa.
Lobo is internationally recognized for exploring the sites of excessive production that are triggered by needs of the human body. By large-scale manufacture, certain objects are distorted in scale and sensual effect—abandoned warehouses of energy drinks, boxes of unused medical casting foam, and thousands of pounds of soap melted in the form of recreational pools. By subverting the intended use of the products, Lobo wrestles the industrial excess back to a human scale.
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A Miami-based artist, Nicolas Lobo recently presented BIO:DIP at Red Bull Studios, New York, an exhibition curated by Neville Wakefield. Other recent projects include The Leisure Pit at the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Martos Gallery’sIn the Flesh, Part 1; and A Modulor Broth at Gallery Diet. His work has been reviewed in ArtNews, Artforum, Interview,and Modern Painters, and he was most recently interviewed by and featured on the cover of the Brooklyn Rail.
For more information on the fair, please visit dallasartfair.com.
