Gabriel Orozco is the first major survey of internationally renowned artist Gabriel Orozco. Spanning Orozco’s varied artistic production from 1990 to 2000, the exhibition includes sculpture, photography, video, installation, and drawing.
Organized by MOCA assistant curator Alma
Ruiz, the exhibition will include over 100 works
that highlight the artist's use of diverse media
and eclectic subject matter. The exhibition
provides an overview of Orozco's multifaceted
body of work, which celebrates unexpected
associations and conceptual links.
Orozco takes his cues from ordinary, often
urban, settings and from found or industrially
fabricated materials. A rubber inner tube, a ball
of plasticine, a tin of cat food, or the cap of a
yogurt container are subtly transformed in
Orozco’s hands. With modest materials in
unexpected combinations, he creates significant
objects that celebrate the discarded and
mundane in contemporary life.
Orozco's sculptures often attempt to contain and
distinguish space. Yielding Stone (1992), a
large plasticine ball that the artist has rolled
through city streets picking up dust and debris,
is the same weight as the artist. In Paris in 1993,
Orozco cut a classic Citroën lengthwise into
three pieces, removed the middle portion, and
fitted the remaining two pieces together. Every
piece was precisely cut and reconstructed to
make the original car exactly 62 centimeters
thinner. La DS (pronounced like la déesse,
French for ‘goddess’) is a remodeled European
icon.
The exhibition will also feature several
large-scale works that explore the dynamics of
games, a theme often found in Orozco’s work.
Ping Pond Table (1998), a Ping-Pong table with
a lily pond in the center, can be played by two to
four players. Oval with Pendulum (1996),
modifies the game of billiards, popular in
France, with a suspended ball. Orozco also
manipulates a series of photographs of men
playing rugby, cricket, and soccer taken from the
London Times. Known as The Atomists, the
works feature these images blown up to life-size
proportions and overlaid with colored circles and
elliptical shapes, recurrent motifs in the artist’s
work.
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