Carlos Amorales: Discarded Spider

Coming this fall is an exhibition featuring the drawings, paintings, sculpture and video work by one of Mexico’s leading contemporary artists, Carlos Amorales. For more than 10 years, Amorales has collected images from books, magazines, the Internet and, most importantly, his own photographs of the urban environment surrounding his Mexico City home and studio. He dissects the composition of each image, isolating a shape over which he creates a digital silhouette through the technique of rotoscoping, a process closely associated with animation.

The resulting imagery—what he calls his Liquid Archive—has grown to include more than 1,500 uncanny digital drawings that include birds, geometric patterns, spider webs, men, monkeys, skulls, wolves, and a woman undergoing the transformation of pregnancy. Amorales fluidly blends the disparate imagery in myriad, unforeseen combinations that evoke both beauty and horror, the familiar and the strange.