Quirarte + Ornelas is a Mexican artist duo made up of Anabel Quirarte (b. 1980) and Jorge Ornelas (b. 1979), who have worked together in Mexico City since 2004. Their work explores what they call mentally traversable space, building structures that move between sculpture, installation, and the two-dimensional plane.
In “Structure and Fragments”, a 2012 show at One and J. Gallery in Seoul, the duo turned ordinary studio objects, including pencils, paper, books, and cassette tapes, into structures and fragments. Pieces such as Drawing Structure, made from pencils speared through balls of crumpled paper, and the Pencils series, arranged from splintered pencils, inverted the modernist idea that form follows function so that function instead follows form.
In the 2017 exhibition “Extrapolación” at Sismo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, their structures moved between three dimensions and two, becoming paintings, works in thread, or sculptural negatives of themselves.,Their 2016 project Progresión modular, shown at the Querétaro State Gallery, centered on Paper Drawing 3, a drawing extended into physical space through triangular paper modules.,
Both artists studied at ENPEG La Esmeralda in Mexico City and at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe, Germany. Their work has entered the collections of the Würth Museum in Germany and the University Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City.In March 2023 the duo released work on the platform objkt.
