Curator, Ann Temkin: This work belongs to a group of sculptures called Spumes, which Orozco made in 2003 in a rented space in Brooklyn. They were made as a process, experimentally, which, like a lot of Orozco’s work, starts out with him deciding how he is going to work with the material, but not necessarily knowing what it was going to end up looking like.
And, for these, he took a polyurethane foam that hardens. And, he wanted to see what it would be if he put it into these various molds, and, forms that would hold it, and then let it harden, and itself become a sculpture in ways that could never have been predicted, from the liquid form of the polyurethane. So, in the end these Spumes seem to be swimming, they have the kind of tail, or fin appearance about them. But that’s something that came during the process of their making. It’s not something that he was setting out to create.