gabriel orozco at pompidou
“Terra Cognita”

by Christine Macel,

An artist constantly on the move, without a fixed studio, Gabriel Orozco (1962, Jalapa, Mexico) rejects national identifications in order to find his inspiration in the places where he lives and to which he travels. Universal images, his works are apprehended in a sensible and sensual manner. This exhibition is the first that the Centre Pompidou devotes to Gabriel Orozco and the only large-scale presentation of his work in France. The artist was closely involved in the conception of the layout of the eighty pieces included, many of which had never before been shown in France. Orozco’s works compose a universe distinguished by a keen interest in elements of the urban landscape and the human body, as well as in casual, everyday incidents. They nourish his work, whose poetry is that of chance, paradox—work that blurs the boundaries between the art object and the day-to-day environment, between art and reality. Movement, expansion, circularity, organic and geometric articulation are also constants that have motivated his artistic quest for over twenty years. As a novel occasion to discover his open-ended, evolving practice incorporating various scales and media, the exhibition shows the full scope of his work:  photographs, sculptures, reconfigured objects, geometric drawings and paintings, from his more emblematic pieces to less-known or very recent works, like the sculptures made from tree trunks found in the Mexican desert. Here Gabriel Orozco proposes a system based on the idea of the workshop: the pieces are very simply arranged, as if they had just been made, before the involvement of the museum’s “exhibition design apparatus.” The south gallery’s vast space has been left “wide open”—the glass walls overlooking the city are unobstructed. This direct link with the street echoes a body of work in which public space plays an important role. The small sculptures are placed on second-hand shelving units—for instance, My Hands Are my Heart (1991), which evokes an association with the body and consists of a heart-shaped ball of clay bearing the imprint of the artist’s fingers, next to a photographic diptych revealing its process of making.







In Horses Running Endlessly (1995), an enlarged game of chess, all the pawns are knights, and the game—thus subtly altered—leads to new trajectories, creating a circular motif on the board. Paintings, photographs, drawings and other works on paper are hung on the walls. The selection of photographs from the early 1990s is based on two criteria: images that are the result of ephemeral interventions by the artist, who manipulates objects to make poetic or humorous assemblages out of them, and simple snapshots of things gleaned from public space. Drawings showing Orozco’s interest in the organic, the shape of the circle, expansion, and the universe, are exhibited alongside Atomists (1996), a series of photographs of sports players cut out of newspapers, on which the artist has placed circular shapes, obtained from the enlargement of the dot screen used in the printing process and then painted in gouache, foreshadowing the abstract geometric paintings he made after 2004. The artist often works with found objects, sometimes garbage, which he reconfigures, in a subtle economy of means, describing himself as a “consumer of everything within reach and a maker of what already exists.” The Working Tables (1990–2000, Centre Pompidou)—a collection of found, modeled objects, and scale-models of pieces—evince ten years of experimentation. The larger sculptures, placed on the floor, issue from a strategy of extraction and reconfiguration operating in Orozco’s work: the artist does not negate the object’s original function, but rather reinterprets it. La DS (1997) is a car, a Citroën DS, cut in half lengthwise and reassembled. In this piece, as in Elevator (1994), the artist reduces a common, everyday space that is altered and caught in the trap of its function. Elsewhere, several spheres rest on the ground, among them, Yielding Stone (1992), a ball of modeling clay that Orozco rolled through the streets as debris it came across adhered to it. In the exhibition space, it continues to collect things, attracting dust, and thus endlessly composing itself, mirroring Orozco’s body of work, in constant transformation. 
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more of 2012
Damián Ortega and Gabriel Orozco
at the 11th Havana Biennial, 2012
Abraham Cruzvillegas
in conversation with Mónica de la Torre
Carlos Amorales
Manifesta 9
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