David Lamelas (Buenos Aires, 1946) is a key figure in conceptual art and one of the leading protagonists of the Argentine art scene of the 1960s. From the outset, his work was marked by a distinctive chameleonic ability to adapt to different contexts—artistic, architectural, geographical, and social—in cities such as London, Brussels, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, New York, and Berlin.
The exhibition dedicated to him by the CGAC in 2021 was his first retrospective in Spain. This catalogue traces the evolution of Lamelas’s work through its different stages, from his early beginnings in Buenos Aires in the early 1960s to the present day. At the same time, it highlights two key aspects of his practice: his relationship with Galicia—his parents emigrated from Manzaneda and Castro Caldelas during the Spanish Civil War—and the central role of project-making and drawing throughout his career, whether as autonomous works, as in the Aleph series (1986–1989), or as tools for developing ideas across sculptural, photographic, filmic, and architectural contexts.