Gabriel Orozco - Overview

Overview

Orozco's exploration of the use of video, drawings, and installations in addition to his photographs and sculptures, allows the audience's imagination to explore the creative associations between oft-ignored objects in today's world. His work permits a rarely allowed interaction between the artwork and the audience. For instance, visitors at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, California, could play a four-person game of table tennis on Orozco's Ping Pond Table (1998). The work's center is a lily pond with four hemispherical ping-pong table pieces arranged in a clover shape around it. At his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1993, Orozco's Home Run piece featured oranges placed in the windows of adjacent apartment buildings. For the 1993 Venice Biennale, Orozco placed a shoe box on the big car on top of the horse on a hippo. “What is most important is not so much what people see in the gallery or the museum, but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again”. - Gabriel Orozco from an interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh in the catalogue Gabriel Orozco: Clinton is Innocent. Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Orozco participated in the Venice Biennale in 1993, 2003, and 2005, the Whitney Biennial (1995 and 1997), as well as Documenta X (1997) and Documenta XI (2002). He has received numerous awards, including the Seccio Espacios Alternativos prize at the Salon Nacional de Artes Plasticas in Mexico City (1987), a DAAD artist-in-residence grant in Berlin (1995), and the German Blue Orange prize (2006).

The foundational paradox of Orozco's sculpture is then that unlike the work of many of his generational peers, it has defined itself from its very beginning as suspended between outright negation, if not self-destruction, and the contemplation of sculpture's precariously continued subsistence in the twentieth century - between the absolute necessity of the subject's artisanal presence in the process of sculptural production and the simultaneous dictate of an absolute prohibition of the hand."

— Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "30/40, A Selection of Forty Artists from Thirty Years at Marian Goodman Gallery."