Gabriel Moreno (b. Galesburg, IL, 1992) works between sculpture, collage, and installation. Moreno’s work believes sculpture is a language of “touch:” a poetic operation where two things meet and change one another. With this in mind he is interested in the medium’s phenomenological coalescence of object, figure, and site.

Fundamental to the work is a longstanding interest in the history of industrialization’s simultaneous productive and extractive forces. In particular, a ten year project looking at Maytag Refrigerator Manufacturing’s relocation from the midwest and what this absence generated. Refrigerators have been forefronted in this inquiry as objects that sometimes resist entropic decay while at other times succumbing to it. Positioned within a cultural situation of failure and persistence he asks “how do social conceptualizations of time frame our experience of such an inheritance?”

His works have been exhibited in galleries and museums including The University of Chicago (2024), The National Museum of Mexican Art (2023), Produce Model Gallery (2019), Randy Alexander Gallery (2017), Trinity College (2017) and Figge Art Museum (2013). He has been featured and given interviews to publications such as NewCity, WBEZ’s Reset, and Denizen Designer. He received BA’s from Knox College in 2014 and completed his MFA at the University of Chicago in 2016. He currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Image: Gabriel Moreno, Maytag Assembly NASCAR NASCAR NASCAR, 2024; Wood, gesso, image transfer; 42.5" x 22"

Headshot: Olivia Wolf