"Gabriel Orozco"
2000-06-04 until 2000-09-03
Museum of Contemporary Art, LA
Los Angeles, CA, USA

Gabriel Orozco is the first major survey of internationally renowned artist Gabriel Orozco. Spanning Orozco’s varied artistic production from 1990 to 2000, the exhibition includes sculpture, photography, video, installation, and drawing.

Organized by MOCA assistant curator Alma Ruiz, the exhibition will include over 100 works that highlight the artist's use of diverse media and eclectic subject matter. The exhibition provides an overview of Orozco's multifaceted body of work, which celebrates unexpected associations and conceptual links.

Orozco takes his cues from ordinary, often urban, settings and from found or industrially fabricated materials. A rubber inner tube, a ball of plasticine, a tin of cat food, or the cap of a yogurt container are subtly transformed in Orozco’s hands. With modest materials in unexpected combinations, he creates significant objects that celebrate the discarded and mundane in contemporary life.

Orozco's sculptures often attempt to contain and distinguish space. Yielding Stone (1992), a large plasticine ball that the artist has rolled through city streets picking up dust and debris, is the same weight as the artist. In Paris in 1993, Orozco cut a classic Citroën lengthwise into three pieces, removed the middle portion, and fitted the remaining two pieces together. Every piece was precisely cut and reconstructed to make the original car exactly 62 centimeters thinner. La DS (pronounced like la déesse, French for ‘goddess’) is a remodeled European icon.

The exhibition will also feature several large-scale works that explore the dynamics of games, a theme often found in Orozco’s work. Ping Pond Table (1998), a Ping-Pong table with a lily pond in the center, can be played by two to four players. Oval with Pendulum (1996), modifies the game of billiards, popular in France, with a suspended ball. Orozco also manipulates a series of photographs of men playing rugby, cricket, and soccer taken from the London Times. Known as The Atomists, the works feature these images blown up to life-size proportions and overlaid with colored circles and elliptical shapes, recurrent motifs in the artist’s work.

Related Links:

Gabriel Orozco, Moon Tree Gabriel Orozco at documenta X

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of California

Other Important Exhibitions in Los Angeles