Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: A Want for Nothing

By ESME GRAHAM  December 2, 2025 

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle relegates a typical vinyl exhibition text to a side wall and instead paints the title on two panels of burnt American ash that lean in the entrance. In A Want for Nothing at the DePaul Art Museum, the Chicago-based artist exhibits objects of the everyday, a departure from his past large-scale architectural creations. They are not simply rendered useless through presentation as an art-object in the museum space, instead, the artist actively obstructs their functionality. Through this blockage, Manglano-Ovalle opens his objects up both to an investigation of their materiality and their generative potential.

Installation view of Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: A Want for Nothing at the DePaul Art Museum, 2025. Photos by Bob.

In the first gallery twenty-five benches made out of burnt American ash are scattered on the floor: upright, upside down, sideways, and stacked atop each other. Because of this configuration, there is no possibility of sitting on them, that is, using them for their “intended” purpose. A nearby cast-iron bucket titled An Attempt to Say Something that Can Actually Hold Water would likely hold water quite well if it weren’t bottomless. Is a bottomless bucket really a bucket at all? Manglano-Ovalle thinks it is; the bucket, while unable to hold water, still seems to contain something intangible. 

Installation view of Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: A Want for Nothing at the DePaul Art Museum, 2025. Photos by Bob.

 Over three hundred glass gallon jugs filled with water rest on metal shelving units affixed to the walls of the second gallery. The space has the feeling of a well-lit doomsday bunker. A tall pump emerges from a metal keg in the middle of the room. Nearby, three photographs depict similar spigots jutting out of the ground amidst a barren landscape. These images are ephemera of a series Manglano-Ovalle made in response to Walter De Maria’s Vertical Earth Kilometer, an earth work in which De Maria inserted a kilometer-long brass rod into the ground, leaving visible only a flattened brass circle. Instead of simply imposing—or foisting—a sculpture into the earth, Manglano-Ovalle creates working water pumps intended for use by members of the local community. While the photographed fountains provide water, in the gallery the spigot is nonfunctional and the jugs are capped and sealed, making visible questions of who grants access to natural resources. 

Installation view of Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: A Want for Nothing at the DePaul Art Museum, 2025. Photos by Bob.

The third gallery holds perhaps the most overtly political work in the exhibition: two absentee-ballot drop boxes from Wisconsin. Formerly functional, they are disallowed due to the increasing suppression of voting rights. These Recumbent Boxes evoke minimalist sculptures, save for the graffiti scrawled on them, a trace of human engagement from a former life. Not only were the boxes rendered useless by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which upheld their prohibition in 2020; Manglano-Ovalle underscores their impotence further by turning them sideways. Introducing A Want For Nothing in the press release, Manglano-Ovalle advises that we avoid metaphor in reading his works. Indeed, there is a literalness to them: there are seats we can’t sit on, water we can’t drink, and ballot boxes that we can’t use to vote. Beyond an interrogation of who or what is performing such a prohibition, Manglano-Ovalle creates objects that, stripped of their prescribed function, open up the possibility of new use.

Installation view of Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: A Want for Nothing at the DePaul Art Museum, 2025. Photos by Bob.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle

A Want for Nothing

DePaul Art Museum

September 11 2025 - February 8 2026