219.
Gabriel
Orozco
MX-1962
410,560
294,660-491,100
PDP-NY
05/23/2016
PAE: 294,660-491,100
Gabriel Orozco, Samurai Tree 21k
Gabriel Orozco, Samurai Tree 21k, 2011, tempera and gold leaf on canvas, 35 1/2 x 35 1/2 in. (90.2 x 90.2 cm) © Images are copyright of their respective owners, assignees or others.

Gabriel Orozco (1962, Mexico) is one of the most complicated artists living today. His work, emerging from the early 1990s and continuing through the early 2000s, takes on many forms, from sculpture, installation, painting, photography to drawing, often combining one with another. His works roam, not only formally, but also spatially. He is known for relocating. Burnt-out, rubber tires (“Chicotes”, 2010), found on roads in Mexico, are collected and exhibited, changing in arrangement as they are shifted from one location to the next. The theme of transformation encompasses his work. “Lintels”, 2001, presents dryer lint hanging loosely across a space via clothing-line-like wires. The fragile pieces of lint, more vulnerable to time than most artworks, contain hair, dust (dead skin), pocket debris, etc. swaying gently as the viewer walks past the work. For a project called “Sandstars”, 2012, he moved organic and inorganic beach debris from Baja California to the interior of the Guggenheim Museum. This and similar works empower the viewer to locate sculpture in the objects that surround them, signifying a reclaiming, that deals with the discarded representatives of our present ecological disaster and addresses excess in general, even in art. Perhaps this helps explain his personal obsession with boomerangs, an object that eventually comes back to the thrower. Orozco also makes use of his own leftovers (of his collected leftovers) in works called “Working Table”, in which he remarks is “a bit like exhibiting all the little experiments with the thought that maybe someone else will be able to make use of them somehow.” Typically with art, we are used to experiencing something made at a fixed moment in history, preserved in its ideal form. Orozco blurs this fixed-time obsession, presenting works that morph, deteriorate and disappear, most-pointedly identifying the works ultimate resting place in one’s imagination. Gabriel Orozco is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery.

Video: Gabriel Orozco. From Tate

Video: Professor Briony Fer - Gabriel Orozco: Mobile Work. From University of the Arts London, TrAIN