Ambiance, attendees underneath Orozco’s Mobile Matrix (2006).
On
December 8, 2009, MoMA hosted the opening night reception for the new
exhibition Gabriel Orozco (December 13, 2009–March 1,
2010). Notable guests included the artist himself, the first lady of
Mexico,
Margarita Zavala, and Emilio
Azcárraga, CEO
of Televisa.
With a body of work that
is unique in its formal power and intellectual rigor, Gabriel Orozco
(Mexican, b. 1962) 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.
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.
