Opening January 29th – April 2, 2026
PROXYCO Gallery, 88 Eldridge Street, New York, NY 10002
Adrian S. Bara
Architecture of Defeat
PROXYCO is pleased to present Architecture of Defeat, a solo exhibition by Adrián S. Bará. The exhibition takes a poetic approach to mirroring New York City, where the artist has lived for the past ten years. Bara brings together a selection of works from the last decade that engage with concepts of structure, alienation, consumption, and architecture as a metaphor for the current state of the world.
The use of appropriated images from newspapers and magazines is recurrent in Bará’s practice, evoking a subtle awareness of how media shapes our understanding of what we call reality. Organic matter, such as real oranges, underscores the passage of time and our own vulnerability within a complex society—one that seems increasingly unable to understand our position in history and in the world at large.
Gypsum panels, repurposed everyday debris, and industrial materials function as storytellers in Bará’s work, allowing him to “examine the emotional dimensions of accelerated change and its effects on the shifting inner and outer landscapes we inhabit.”
—Fabian Flückiger
Adrián S. Bará (b.1982, Mexico City) lives and works in New York. His practice, at its core, explores the body and its relation to space, architecture and structures that define everyday life. His work occupies an intermediary position between abstraction, figuration and site-specific sculpture, a practice in which a concern for materiality, space and the human body constitutes a central force. The artist’s training as a filmmaker drives his narrative— pulling in from daily materials and positions to construct ‘sculpted situations’ that are meant to be activated by viewers as they project their own accounts into the objects that invite them to do so. Bará’s artwork often functions as archival traces of events—as stories that are meant to be intervened, challenged and transformed through act of looking.
Bará has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions at venues such as The National Academy of design, The Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling in New York, The Bass Museum of Art and ArtCenter South Florida in Miami Florida, Museo de Arte de Zapopan in Guadalajara Mexico, Sean Kelly Gallery, Kasmin Gallery and Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York, Travesía Cuatro Gallery in Guadalajara and PEANA Gallery in Mexico City. In film, he was director of photography for the documentary The Solitude of Memory, which was included in the Cannes Film Festival in 2015. Bará has completed residencies at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York, PIVÓ in Sao Paulo, Brazil Casa Wabi in Oaxaca, Mexico, Casa Nano in Japan and Fondazione Macc in Sardinia Italy. His works are part of private and public collections such as: Isabel and Agustín Coppel Collection, Diéresis Collection, Gaia Collection, Luciano Benetton Imago Mundi Collection, Sayago & Pardon Collection and Suro Collection.