About the artist
Yorky Mencia Garcia
Yorky Mencia Garcia (b.1983) is a Cuban artist living in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is a
multidisciplinary artist working with a wide range of materials. Yorky’s latest work is a series of
functional sculptures, where he decontextualizes and rearranges found objects and materials to
create new meanings and ideas.
“As an artist, I find beauty, usefulness, and meaning in, places, objects, and things that otherwise
would disappear in the ordinary. With my work, I intend to take the ordinary, the discarded,
sometimes the ugly and elevate it to artistic expression.”
Yorky uses discarded industrial and household waste to create sculptural artifacts. His work is a
playful assembly of forms that combines geometric industrial objects with organic shapes or
moldable artistic materials. His rearrangement of found objects brings histories (as they are
embedded on the object) together, as they are enmeshed, and intertwined in our lives, creating a
poetic reading and meaning.
More than a thousand views (2022)
In this piece, I was inspired by academic discussions about the economy of attention
and the transforming agency that new communication technologies have on our ways of socializing.
I placed this mobile in the center of the gallery to create a giant interactive
installation made from prosthetic eyeballs from around the Second World War and
purchased in Germany. These eyeballs originally conceived to substitute soldiers’
and other people’s lost eyes are now decontextualized to create this interactive
installation. The prosthetic eyeballs in a person’s face or this installation, as the
many views on social media, are like mirrors of our narcissistic tendency. No
human being is behind them except the reflection of yourself
Personalized bobbles (2018)
Found wood, glass, plaster, and nails
This piece is a commentary on a post-factual society, where technology allows and
encourages us to pick an instrument of measurement that best suits our own beliefs.
Instruments are out there to fit each of ours preferences rather than to serve as a
common guide in a search for truth.
Environmental series (2021)
The Environmental series plays with non-conventional art material to recreate landscapes that are on the boundaries of abstraction and figurative painting and sculptures. For this series, I used reclaimed construction and industrial materials.
Functional sculptures
As an artist, I found pleasure on the task of elevating the aesthetic character of discarded objects and materials found on construction sites and around the city.
I see found objects as the materials for my own anthropological research, where I have to figure out their history and possible use at the same time reinvent a new future for them. This process is particularly interesting because allows me to work with multiple layers of meanings. For me, the history and identity of the objects are as central to the creation of new artifacts as their formal properties.
