gabriel orozco at MoMAdark wave, 2006

 

a retrospective on gabriel orozco, the mexican conceptual artist december 13, 2009 – march 1, 2010 sixteen years after his first solo exhibition at the museum of modern art

the exhibition in new york will be followed by presentations at kunstmuseum basel, april 18 – august 10, 2010; musée national d’art moderne, centre georges pompidou, paris, september 15, 2010 – january 3, 2011; and tate modern, london, january 19 – april 25, 2011.

 

gabriel orozco at MoMA the holiday home in mexico designed by artist gabriel orozco and built with the help of architect tatiana bilbao photo © iwan baan, see more here

gabriel orozco at MoMA ‘the long ball’, 1993

 

gabriel orozco at MoMA ‘horses running endlessly’, 1995

 

many of orozco’s works—which are often created specifically for the occasion of an exhibition— have become indisputable classics of 1990s art, such as the citroën automobile surgically reduced to two-thirds its normal width (la DS, 1993) and a human skull covered with a graphite grid (black kites, 1997). this exhibition presents many of these works for the first time in new york, alongside rich selections of work from orozco’s vast body of smaller objects, paintings, and works on paper.

 

gabriel orozco at MoMA ‘la D.S.’, 1993

 

in 1993 gabriel orozco sliced a silver citroën ds into three parts and then reassembled only two-thirds of it.

 

gabriel orozco at MoMA ‘black kites’, 1997-2001

 

orozco fuses the polarized worlds of the organic and technical, the natural and the manufactured.

 

gabriel orozco was born in 1962 in jalapa, veracruz, mexico. he lives and works in new york and mexico city. with a body of work that is unique in its formal power and intellectual rigor, gabriel orozco emerged at the beginning of the 1990s as one of the most intriguing and original artists of his generation—and one of the last to come of age in the twentieth century. orozco resists confinement to a single medium, roaming freely and fluently among drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and painting. from one project to the next, he deliberately blurs the boundaries between the art object and the everyday environment, instead situating his contributions in a place that merges art and reality,whether in exquisite drawings made on airplane boarding passes or in sculptures made from recovered trash.