Gabriel Orozco Biografie
Gabriel Orozco (born 1962) is a Mexican artist fascinated with subverting expectations through his use of everyday objects. By using materials and circumstances that we as a society encounter in our everyday lives and routines, Gabriel Orozco forces viewers to make new links or notice things that would previously be overlooked. He often creates humorous scenarios that play on a placement of objects in unexpected locations.
Gabriel Orozco is the son of Mexican muralist Mario Orozco Rivera and through him was exposed to galleries and artists at a very young age. After studying the at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Mexico and Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain, he gained his artistic reputation and signature style in the early 1990s. With his selection of drawings, photographs, sculptures and installations he sought to break from the mainstream of art and his nomadic lifestyle meant that he resisted the studio-based practice of his contemporaries. He has always liked to immerse himself completely in different cultures, affording his work a wide range of influences and themes that primarily include but are not limited to, conceptualism, the artistic traditions of Mexico and Marcel Duchamp’s readymades.
Some of Gabriel Orozco’s most iconic works include his piece La DS, which is a Citroën car reduced to two-thirds its normal width and Black Kites, a skull covered with a black and white, chess board grid. His abstract paintings appear to depart quite drastically from the rest of his oeuvre but allow him to manipulate core techniques associated with the medium. Using a computer program, Gabriel Orozco explores notions of movement through a splitting, dividing and repetition of circles.
Gabriel Orozco has had solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery, London, the Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Kunsthalle Zürich, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and Museum of Modern Art, New York. His work has also been included in the Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial and Documenta, Kassel, Germany.
