The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

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Important Update

October 26, 2025 to October 18, 2026 | Main Street Sculpture

Ignacio Gatica

Ignacio Gatica’s art weaves poetry into the fabric of finance, tracing how today’s cities echo the hidden currents of global trade. His practice identifies and questions systems of knowledge and structures of economic power that differentiate civic places from private spaces, extraction sites from exchange sites, and leisure zones from work areas.

Born in 1988 in Santiago, Chile, Gatica’s work explores the forceful links between the United States and The Americas, driven by the broader agenda of globalization. He analyzes this leveled worldview, which has made urban spaces across the hemisphere more generic, adhering to the mold of financial districts in the United States. This is exemplified by the rebranding of Santiago, Chile, into an upscale financial district dubbed "Sanhattan." His practice is centered on surveying how this US-centric worldview has impacted daily experiences in public spaces throughout the world.

Recently, Gatica has been focused on the collapse of the geographical distance between extraction sites and exchange hubs. He reimagines data streams by incorporating imagery that exemplifies this process of Manhattanization or creating pointillistic LED pixel landscapes where elements like the sun, mountains, and horizon are encoded to represent the flow of capital. He constructs these screens from aluminum and steel, assembling arrays of circuits into forms that riff on the illuminated displays of Times Square and Wall Street. These LED sculptures recontextualize how and where we think about the global economy. For the 2025/2026 Main Street Sculpture, Gatica will explore how different zones of economic interests are psychologically and physically linked. This newly commissioned work will take the form of an illuminated display that complicates the distinctions between city and suburb, entangling sites of commerce with zones of leisure.

Ignacio Gatica is organized by Eduardo Andres Alfonso, Associate Curator.

Artist Bio

Ignacio Gatica (b. 1988, Santiago, Chile) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Working between installation, sculpture, video, and text, his work studies signs and signifiers from social and economic structures, revealing unsuspecting connections between them. Gatica's solo exhibitions include: Playa Privada, Galería Patricia Ready. Santiago, Chile (2025) Sujeto Cuantificado at Von Ammon Co. in Washington, D.C. (2023), Stones Above Diamonds at Cooper Cole in Toronto (2021), 13:28 at Marso Foundation in Mexico City (2019), TAANSTAFL: There is no such thing as a free lunch at Interstate Projects in New York, NY (2019). His work has been featured in group exhibitions at institutions such as SculptureCenter in New York City (2022), the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, New York (2022), and El Museo del Barrio in New York, NY (2017).



Top image: Ignacio Gatica, Untitled, 2025. Courtesy of the artist