Pedro Gómez-Egaña: The Great Learning

Working in sculpture, performance, video, and drawing, Pedro Gómez-Egaña draws on practices of composition and choreography to create dynamic constellations of objects and events in time. 

For his first US museum exhibition, The Great Learning, Gómez-Egaña materializes our polyrhythmic experiences of time. “We live in an age when contrasting temporalities coexist with an intensity that often feels irreconcilable,” he has said. “Media saturation, geological alteration, algorithmic immediacy, 24/7 labor culture, supply chain dynamics, and the relentless spectacle of political cycles” all condition how we make sense of the world and weigh on our capacity for apperception. 

Across the exhibition, architectural spaces are cut open and multiplied, interrogated, and made to eclipse or dissolve. Objects are cast in precise relationships and move in ways that may evade perception—at times harnessing gravity or finding unexpected alignment. Viewers are spectators, listeners, and animating lenses as they move through the space or pause in curiosity. 

The Great Learning borrows its title from a work by British avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew and is inspired, in part, by Cardew’s experimental work with an ensemble of non-musicians known as The Scratch Orchestra. Gómez-Egaña, who trained as a musician and composer before turning to visual art, similarly delegates some of the show’s action to a team of gallery attendants, or Orchestrators, who shift the exhibition’s physical elements and soundscape. Their gestures—both utilitarian and improvisational—are conceived as a conversation with the works and the space itself. Drawing on features of both architecture and dramaturgy, Gómez-Egaña stages spatial dislocations and moments of uncanniness to expose the affective qualities of objects and theporous, unstable conditions of contemporary life. 

Pedro Gómez-Egaña’s exhibition is organized by Natalie Bell, Curator.

Pedro Gómez-Egaña (b. 1976, Bucaramanga, Colombia) lives and works in Oslo, Norway, where he is Professor of Sculpture and Installation at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. He holds an MFA and PhD in Visual Arts from Bergen Academy of Art and Design and a BA from the Goldsmiths’ College, London, where he studied performance and music composition. Recent institutional solo exhibitions have taken place at: Podium, Oslo (2023); Kode Museum, Bergen, Norway (2021); Munch Museum, Oslo (2019); Yarat Contemporary Art Space, Baku, Azerbaijan (2018); Entrée, Bergen (2017); and Prosjektrom Normanns, Stavanger, Norway, and Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen (2015). He has also exhibited at the 16th Lyon Biennial, France (2022); MAMBO, Bogotá (2021); Henie Onstad Art Center, Oslo (2021); TENT Rotterdam, the Netherlands (2018); the Contour Biennial, Mechelen, Belgium (2017); the 15th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2017); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2017); Kochi-Muziris Biennial, India (2016); and Performa 13, New York (2013); among many others.