Exhibitions

Delcy Morelos: origo

London, United Kingdom

A temple of earth inside brutalist London — dark, fragrant, handmade, and quietly spiritual. The work is installed in the Barbican’s outdoor Sculpture Court, responding directly to its iconic concrete architecture.

Delcy Morelos: origo, Installation view
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Meet the artist

Delcy Morelos

The Movement

Contemporary Art, Earth Art, Immersive Installations

ArtLovers Tip

A must-see London 2026 public artwork: elemental, meditative and powerful — the kind of installation that does not explain the world, but brings you back to its origin.

Exhibition Highlights - What you'll see

origo is a major public artwork by Colombian artist Delcy Morelos, known for monumental installations made with earth, clay, natural pigments and organic materials. This is her first public artwork in the United Kingdom.

At the Barbican, Morelos creates a large oval earth structure that visitors can enter. The title origo means origin in Latin, and the oval form suggests birth, womb, shelter and beginning. The work brings together soil, scent, darkness and architecture, transforming the Barbican’s hard concrete into something more primal and sensory.

You don’t just look at this artwork. You walk into it. You smell it. You feel the contrast between the city and the ground, between brutalism and earth, between modern architecture and ancestral memory.

Worth the trip

origo asks one of the biggest questions of our time: how do we reconnect with the earth when we have turned it into property, resource, surface, or background?

Morelos’s practice is rooted in ancestral Andean cosmovisions, while also speaking the language of Minimalism and Abstraction. Her work reflects on the relationship between human beings and the materiality of the earth — not as “dirt”, but as origin, memory and living matter.

For Artlovers, this is worth seeing because it offers something rare in a city like London: an artwork that slows the body down. It is not a screen, not a spectacle, not a quick image. It is an environment that asks you to enter, breathe, and remember that the ground beneath us is not passive.

How to experience it

Go alone, or with someone who knows how to stay quiet.

Enter slowly. Notice the smell before the form. Notice the darkness before the structure. Then step back and look at the tension: a handmade earth body placed inside one of London’s great concrete utopias.

This is not just an installation. It is a reminder: before cities, before markets, before museums — there was earth.

London, United Kingdom

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