Exhibitions
Guadalupe Ayala's monumental installation occupies the MNAV
The National Museum of Visual Arts presents GEMA, a monumental sculptural installation by Guadalupe Ayala, curated by Laura Bardier and Santiago Tavella. Conceived specifically for Room 1 of the MNAV, the work is the artist's most ambitious project to date, both in terms of its scale and the complexity of the technical and conceptual processes that underpin it.
GEMA is part of a line of research that Ayala has been developing steadily for over a decade, focused on exploring the frictions, continuities, and resonances between the human and the natural. In this new piece, the artist deepens this inquiry through a structure that engages with the architectural space and the viewer's body, proposing an immersive and constantly transforming experience.
The installation also functions as a contemporary reflection on Uruguayan sculptural tradition: its historical relationship with matter and the environment, as well as with notions of process, instability, and becoming. The unfinished and the mutable appear here not as a lack, but as potential, enabling multiple interpretations and temporalities.
Constructed from a complex combination of glass, cement, metal, organic materials, textiles, resin, and fragments of antique tableware, the work was developed through a process of digital modeling and experimental fabrication that brought together a multidisciplinary team. This technical and material framework not only supports the scale of the project but also actively contributes to its meaning.
In its spatial arrangement, GEMA establishes a direct dialogue with both the architecture of the MNAV and the tradition of Uruguayan art, activating historical references without losing its grounding in a contemporary sensibility. The sculpture unfolds in a field of tensions: between monumentality and intimacy, between the visible and the veiled, between the apparent stability of matter and its inevitably mutable nature.
The visitor's path allows for different levels of interpretation. From the base, where weight and structural density are evident, to the elevated areas, where glass and light fragment and reconfigure the perception of space, the work proposes an experience that oscillates between the physical and the perceptual, between the solid and the ephemeral.
The exhibition can be visited from December 5, 2025 to May 17, 2026, in Room 1 of the National Museum of Visual Arts, consolidating itself as one of the most relevant exhibition milestones of the season.
"GEMA synthesizes many of the concerns that the MNAV seeks to bring into dialogue today: the relationship between art and architecture, tradition and contemporaneity, matter and thought. It is an exhibition that not only occupies our galleries, but also interprets and redefines them," says Roxana Fabius, director of the National Museum of Visual Arts.
