Titled after a line from a T.S. Eliot poem, Jorge Tacla: Time the destroyer is time the preserver examines how enduring truths can be excavated in the aftermath of destruction. Structured as eight chapters, the exhibition brings together over 170 works including paintings, drawings and a large-scale installation, on view from 8 February to 7 June 2026 at Galleries 1, 2 and 3 in Al Mureijah Square, Sharjah City.
A third-generation Chilean of Palestinian and Syrian descent, Tacla has been working between Santiago and New York since 1981. The exhibition opens with the chapter titled ‘Body and Violence’, which features the artist’s early figurative works from the 1980s, when the artist was immersed in the Black and Hispanic cultural spheres of New York’s East Village. Drawing on Francis Bacon’s depictions of bodies in agony, works such as Untitled (1985) and Diciembre (December) (1988) were produced amid escalating racial tensions and the emergence of the 24/7 news cycle.
This chapter also introduces works from Cuaresma en Atacama / Out of Focus (1989), developed after the artist’s time in Chile’s Atacama Desert. This landscape is explored more in the second chapter titled "Remembering the Desert" with paintings such as Logical Product #2 (1992) and Paraíso (Paradise) (1994). Within these works, the inclusion of what the artist calls ‘remnants of the living’ disrupts the colonialist notion of desert expanses as "empty."
