Gala Porras-Kim

A Hand in Nature

Jan 24-Jun 1, 2025

Gala Porras-Kim: A Hand in Nature. Installation view at MCA Denver, 2024. Photo: Wes Magyar

Multi-disciplinary artist Gala Porras-Kim’s practice questions how knowledge is acquired and tests the potential for artworks and objects to function as meaning-makers outside of traditional museum contexts. For her exhibition, A Hand in Nature, which originated at MCA Denver, Porras-Kim extends lines of questioning into conservation, preservation, and care to the broader natural world and lived environment. The artworks on view distill natural processes into sculptures, paintings and drawings that will grow, evolve or degrade throughout the span of the exhibition. From sculptures rendered with salt-saturated concrete or copal resin wetted with local rainwater, to paintings created from slow drips of water drawing from the museum’s humidity and projections from light refractions off of brass panels, Porras-Kim’s work imagines what might be possible if natural forces and phenomena had the agency to self-determine.

Generous support provided by The Robert H. Reakirt Foundation.

This exhibition is organized by Leilani Lynch, Associate Curator, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver.

About the Artist


Gala Porras-Kim
Gala Porras-Kim Gala Porras-Kim lives and works in Los Angeles and London. Her work is about how the social and political contexts that influence history have been framed through the fields of linguistics, history and conservation. The work considers the way institutions shape inherited codes and forms and conversely, how objects can shape the contexts in which they are placed. Porras-Kim has had solo exhibitions at the MCA, Denver; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; Museo delle Civilita, Rome in 2024; Leeum and MMCA Seoul; the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla; MUAC, Mexico City; in 2023; Gasworks, London, Amant Foundation, Brooklyn, and Kadist in 2022, and the MOCA, Los Angeles in 2019 among others. Her work has been included in the Liverpool Biennial (2023), and Gwangju and Sao Paulo Biennales (2021), Whitney Biennial and Ural Industrial Biennial (2019). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019) and the artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-22).

Gala Porras-Kim

Gala Porras-Kim lives and works in Los Angeles and London. Her work is about how the social and political contexts that influence history have been framed through the fields of linguistics, history and conservation. The work considers the way institutions shape inherited codes and forms and conversely, how objects can shape the contexts in which they are placed. Porras-Kim has had solo exhibitions at the MCA, Denver; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; Museo delle Civilita, Rome in 2024; Leeum and MMCA Seoul; the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla; MUAC, Mexico City; in 2023; Gasworks, London, Amant Foundation, Brooklyn, and Kadist in 2022, and the MOCA, Los Angeles in 2019 among others. Her work has been included in the Liverpool Biennial (2023), and Gwangju and Sao Paulo Biennales (2021), Whitney Biennial and Ural Industrial Biennial (2019). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019) and the artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-22).