Gabriel Orozco
(Xalapa, 1962) Mexican plastic artist, one of the most valued in the international circuit, author of a wide and versatile work that ranges from sculpture to spontaneous installations, including photography, video, drawing and art-object.
Gabriel Orozco
Considered one of the ten most important and influential creators in the world, perhaps the greatest renovator of the plastic arts in recent years, Orozco's work is essential in any important event of contemporary art and enriches biennials and museums in Europe and America.
Gabriel Orozco was born in Xalapa, capital of the Mexican state of Veracruz, in 1962.He grew up and studied in Mexico City, and his personality was forged on the campus and at the National School of Plastic Arts (ENAP) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the largest in Latin America.In 1986 he began, with a one-year study trip to Madrid, the journey of someone who in 2005 was not yet a prophet in his land and for a long time, instead, turned out to be a great renovator for the rest of the world.
Gabriel Orozco lives between New York and Paris, more than in Mexico, whose art he considers backward in the midst of neo-Mexicanism.Since the beginning of the 1990s, when he abandoned the more traditional sculpture, his work responded to the different materials, contexts and situations that he encountered in public spaces anywhere in the world.There, in the midst of the everyday, he planted the unusual.His work "rewrites cities", it has been said.
He has no study, because he wants to create, turn any situation into an aesthetic experience, and he is not interested in working in a totally pre-established environment.Nor does it have a gallery, although it opened one, called Kurimanzutto, whose main characteristic is that it has no place, or at least no fixed space.He opened it for other iconoclasts as creative as him, because Orozco did not need it since he dedicated himself to triumph by exposing his creation La DS , a Citroën sliced and transformed, without the central part, into a rare species stylized racing car.
Iconoclastic artist
Since the mid-1990s he was considered the most significant and indefinable renovator, and corroborated the daring of his ideas every time he displayed, for example, a shoe box."A thing empty of meaning, a container of dust and a box of nothingness," it said.To the most hostile comments, amid the avalanche of criticism he received, he replied: "Yes, anyone could do it, but I had the balls."
On the contrary, he supported with impressive photographic evidence the concentration and thoroughness that they required many of his jobs.For example, in Black Kites , a skull that in 1997 he covered with criss-cross stripes to form a disfigured chess set.Orozco said to draw like this in the third dimension.When he went out on the street he did not even carry a camera, but with his working method he wanted to "generate a space of resignification or dislocation and reconsideration" of his environment.
La DS (1993) and Black Kites (1997)
Much of the originality and eclecticism that characterized his work, and which he prided himself on, came from the rescue and exploration of the most disparate objects and materials.Many of them went from the street to his workshop and from there to a museum.Among his creations were countless lost pieces, urban waste, ephemeral materials and other testimonies from industry and consumption.Insatiably roamed the beaches of Mexico, especially those of Oaxaca, or the slums of megalopolises, such as New York, to collect rusty cans, beer labels, construction grids and other garbage that he transformed into objects of art with the care of a father and the illusion of a child.
A childhood friend turned filmmaker, Juan Carlos Martín, accompanied him in his artistic-garbage triad for a year and a half from 1999, to capture a carefree and irreverent collage of music, shapes and formats variegated in the documentary Gabriel Orozco (2002), which won several awards such as film, documentary, acting and directing.Martín contrasted the brainy interpretations of the specialists to the starts spontaneous creation or transformation that the established artist displayed."Style is an accident, it is not sought after," said Orozco, who, rocking in a hammock, revealed between beer and beer his own misunderstanding of himself and, at the same time, that he did not take himself too seriously.
The international repercussion of Orozco's work was just beginning to reach Mexico when the Rufino Tamayo Museum in the capital dedicated a retrospective exhibition to him in 2000 that sparked great controversy.Orozco would once again escape from Mexican "localism".Only in 2005 did he come to recognize that art had grown in Mexico "in the last four years", although he specified that investments were very limited and the artists themselves had to take flight.He also considered that criticism had been left behind, stagnant.
In 2005, Mexican art landed in Madrid with the ARCO Fair and overflowed with centers and galleries.The Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presented an exhibition for three months in which Gabriel Orozco summarized the diversity of fifteen years of creative explosion and also gave the Palacio de Cristal a sculptural life. Shadow between air rings , a recreation of the removable work that in 2003 presented the Italian pavilion at the historic 50th Venice Biennale, became the Retiro in a renewed dialogue between architecture and sculpture in relation with the Platonic and the real, with time and art.
Visitors to the peculiar retrospective, brought together by the constant memory of time-as Orozco himself pointed out-, could even participate in that endless creation and transformation of Orozquian work.A piece of plasticine, Stone that yields , of the same weight as its maker, would show, always different, the traces of being rolled on the ground and handled by countless admirers.
Orozco even rejected the comfortable conceptual label that was hung everywhere to fit him at least among those far from traditional art.He considered that his style was so new that it required the invention of a differentiating label.And he was happy to add, "Luckily, my art and I don't have that specific name yet." He still had walls and borders to break down in his tireless work.
His participation as curator in the organizing team at the 2003 Venice Biennale, as well as in the exhibition "The Everyday Altered", gave much to speak, as he himself would admit.When ARCO offered to take the Mexico section as a guest country, he preferred to focus on his own project, although, in his opinion, the artist "needs that curator, conscience and mirror, to help him discover what he himself does not see in his work."
The experts pointed out that the games of opposites and the perception of the dualities of things were constant concerns that endowed this jalapeño with a universal character: the human and the mechanical, the found and the manufactured, nature and environmental impact, geometry and chance, death and the concept of infinity...A philosophical curiosity that was not translated with grandstanding, but directly appealed to emotion or played with instant.Like that Breathing on piano , a halo that disappeared and was only registered in a photograph.Many of his own creative photos were made extraordinary by title.
The irony led him to create Pendulum Oval , an oval pool table, and display it at the Tate Modern, or to invite the viewer to read an installation like Penske Project , consisting of photos of clay pots from various cultures, in a sociopolitical key.His work Stained Glass , a poster that could be seen in London Underground stations in 2004, was based on a photograph of a tree full of tangled kites that the artist took a few years earlier in Jaipur, India."The tree had no leaves and the abandoned kites, reflecting the afternoon sun, created a geometric pattern of colored leaves; in the subway it looks very good," he would say.
In 2005 the first book was published in Mexico with sixteen texts written by art historians and specialists, all foreigners, about the work of this globetrotter turned art guru iconoclastic.By now, Europe and America adored him, and they were anxiously waiting to see what Gabriel Orozco would do the next time he created a work in the same place where he was going to exhibit it.
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