Press room

From Friday 15 May, UK audiences can experience a major public artwork by Colombian artist Delcy Morelos, presented by the Barbican, in the City's Culture Mile. The project will respond to the Barbican’s iconic concrete architecture, carrying forward the Visual Arts’ commitment to commissioning beyond its gallery walls.

Delcy Morelos’s practice is rooted in ancestral Andean cosmovisions and the aesthetics of Minimalism and Abstraction. Her works inspire rumination on the interplay between human beings and the materiality of earth. Born in 1967 in Tierralta, in the Córdoba region – an area that was brutally affected by armed conflict stemming from illegal land appropriation and large-scale mining projects throughout the 1990s and early 2000s – Morelos began making paintings from red clay pigments that explored the entanglements between the body, territory and violence. Morelos has consistently represented beliefs in the earth as a symbiotic partner endowed with its own agency, rather than a resource to be possessed and controlled. Developing her material investigations into soil and plant matter through a framework informed by Andean and Amazonian relations to land, Morelos began creating colossal, monochromatic earthworks in which she intends her audience to be immersed.

These sculptural installations function as multisensory environments. Handbuilt from clay, soil, hay and plant seed, Morelos sows the earthen bodies of her works with fragrant spices, including cinnamon and cloves, which also contain antifungal properties vital for maintaining the health of the soil. Combined with the loamy scent of the soil itself, the heady fragrance of these spices engenders a sensory encounter that triggers emotions and memories, encouraging a more ethical relationship with what Morelos calls the ‘mother of all materials’.

origo responds to the Barbican’s architecture through its minimalist geometry and its organic materiality. Hand hewn and intensely tactile, the concrete surfaces of the Barbican represent a layered socio-architectural narrative arising from the devastation wrought by the Blitz and driven forward by post-war social idealism, modernist architectural principles, and humanist approaches to urban living. Influenced by Le Corbusier, the Barbican was designed in 1959 by architects Chamberlin, Powell and Bon as a utopian ‘city within a city’ with high-density housing, elevated walkways, cultural infrastructure and integrated green spaces. As a central public space within this communal living project, the Sculpture Court was conceived to integrate art into everyday life. 

The opening of origo is the first time in a decade that the Court has been used for its original purpose. Measuring 24 metres by 18 metres in diameter, and reaching over three metres in height, this is Morelos’ most ambitious outdoor work to date. Like the Barbican, there is the trace of touch and labour visible on its surface. Taking on a rounded shape, in a departure from the precise, angular forms Morelos has developed over the last decade, origo is configured as an ovular pavilion with multiple entry points. The porous topography of the work responds to the Barbican's unrelenting concrete, positioning the precarious and malleable in dialogue with the rigid and imposing, highlighting the permeability of our bodies and their entanglement with the very material of the earth. Soil lined tunnels, each with its own symmetry and depth, disappear into the body of the structure in a motion of inward circulation, inviting us to begin thinking of community and communal living as something that occurs beyond our species – between humankind and the life contained in the micro matter of the earth itself.

The sculpture invites the public to surround themselves with this mass of earth; to roam its tunnels, experience its shifting light and fragrant smells, rest in its central enclosure and become part of its ecosystem. Through this encounter between soil and cement, ancestral South American knowledge meets the utopian, humanist ideals that underpin the Barbican, opening a space to reconsider how we live in the world.

A series of public conversations, including an artist talk with Delcy Morelos on 15 May will expand on the themes of Morelos's installation. A short film that documents the installation’s construction process and includes an interview with the artist will be presented in the Barbican Art Gallery’s Level 3 foyer as well as the Barbican’s website.

About Delcy Morelos

Born in 1967 in Tierralta in the region of Córdoba in Colombia, Delcy Morelos studied at the Cartagena School of Fine Arts. She lives and works in Bogotá. Solo exhibitions include Las formas de la sombra, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Switzerland (2026); El espacio vientre, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City, Mexico (2025);  Madre, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2025), Profundis, CAAC Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain (2024); Interwoven, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO (2024); El Abrazo, Dia Chelsea, New York (2023); El lugar del alma, Museo Moderno, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Enie, Fundación NC-Arte, Bogotá (2018); Inner Earth, Röda Sten Konsthall, Göteborg, Sweden (2018). Morelos was awarded the Pérez Prize in Public Art & Civic Design (2024) and the ARTnews Awards Established Artist of the Year (2024).

This summer, as part of the Bozar Monumental series, Morelos will create a new large-scale installation for Bozar’s Horta Hall, on view from 28 June to 30 August 2026. Please see more information here.

About Commissioning at the Barbican

The Barbican has been commissioning international artists to make bold new work inside The Curve gallery since 2006. More recently, this ambitious programme has expanded beyond the gallery walls into the Barbican's public realm, with Ranjani Shettar's Cloud songs on the horizon in the Barbican Conservatory in 2023, and Ibrahim Mahama's Purple Hibiscus, which transformed the Barbican’s Lakeside Terrace in 2024.

Our public commissioning programme is generously funded by the Cheng-Lan Foundation's Common Ground initiative as part of a multi-year partnership.

Commissioning artists sits at the heart of the Barbican's Artistic Vision, with a renewed commitment to enabling artists to realise their most ambitious ideas and presenting them, free of charge, to the widest possible audience. To make this possible, we are establishing the Barbican Commissioning Council: an engaged group of passionate supporters who share our belief in the importance of this work. Their vital contribution will enable this programme to flourish and ensure it reaches the many thousands of visitors to the Barbican each year. Special thanks to the founding members of the Commissioning Council: Anastasia Bukhman/Bukhman Foundation, Stephanie Camu, Aarti Lohia/SP Lohia Foundation, Mark & Dana Strong, Tia Collection and Brian Yue & Claire Bi/Cheng-Lan Foundation.

Lead Philanthropic Supporter: Bukhman Foundation

Major support from the Cheng-Lan Foundation, Destination Partner Culture Mile BID, and additional support from The Ampersand Foundation, the Barbican Commissioning Council, Will Palley and Marian Goodman Gallery