Colecciones de arte

Trajectory

During the early nineties, Gabriel Orozco abandoned the practice of traditional sculpture to focus his attention on urban landscapes and everyday objects. With these, he began a series of proposals through which he sought to transform conventional notions of reality by appealing to spectators' attention and imagination. The way Orozco approaches objects gives rise to a series of metaphors on the transitory. The appropriation and alteration of objects such as a ping-pong table, an airplane ticket or a chess board force us to re-examine our conventional relationships with these objects and to consider them within the context of social exchange, geographic mobility, economic relations, yet also -and above al- the poetics of the ordinary.

Since he made his first impact on the contemporary art world with his DS, a Citröen automobile sliced in half with its centre removed in order to create an exaggeratedly stylised and aerodynamic model, Orozco has created a large number of artworks in diverse media that include sculpture, drawing, photography, installation and video. Nonetheless, in all these cases, the content ignores traditional formal constrictions. For Documenta X, Orozco presented Black Kites, a human skull upon which he had developed a geometric drawing with black rhombus that covered it entirely, therefore literally and symbolically juxtaposing two opposing systems: the natural, physical world and the ideal, abstract world of geometry.

As a conceptual artist, Orozco has characteristically detected banal situations and transformed them into metaphorical illustrations of the poetry of the ordinary: human breath just about to disappear from a shiny black piano -Breath on Piano-, a dog sleeping on sand, the movement of his tail making a drawing -Dog Circle- or a ball in a puddle reflecting the night sky, wherein the ball doubles as an enormous full moon -Ball on water-. All these works are presented as photographs as well as documents that capture, not only the passing moment, but also the subjective presence of the attentive artist who knows how to recognise these ephemeral sculptural events and record them with the camera so they will last.

Gabriel Orozco has presented his work in prestigious centres and museums all around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Venice Biennial and Documenta X and XI. Recently, an extensive retrospective exhibition of his work was held in Mexico City and at the Contemporary Art Museum of Los Angeles. He currently lives and works in Mexico, Paris and New York. I. M. B.