Gabriel Orozco

Dec 13, 2009–Mar 1, 2010

MoMA

Installation view of Gabriel Orozco at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar
  • MoMA, Floor 6, Exhibition Galleries The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Gallery

With a body of work that is unique in its formal power and intellectual rigor, Gabriel Orozco (Mexican, b. 1962) emerged at the beginning of the 1990s as one of the most intriguing and original artists of his generation—and one of the last to come of age in the twentieth century. Orozco resists confinement to a single medium, roaming freely and fluently among drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and painting. From one project to the next, he deliberately blurs the boundaries between the art object and the everyday environment, instead situating his contributions in a place that merges “art” and “reality,” whether in exquisite drawings made on airplane boarding passes or in sculptures made from recovered trash.

Many of Orozco’s works—which are often created specifically for the occasion of an exhibition—have become indisputable classics of 1990s art, such as the Citroën automobile surgically reduced to two-thirds its normal width (La DS, 1993) and a human skull covered with a graphite grid (Black Kites, 1997). This exhibition presents many of these works for the first time in New York, alongside rich selections of work from Orozco’s vast body of smaller objects, paintings, and works on paper.

Please note: Orozco’s whale-skeleton sculpture, Mobile Matrix, will be on view in the second-floor Marron Atrium through Monday, February 15.

The exhibition in New York will be followed by presentations at Kunstmuseum Basel, April 18–August 10, 2010; Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, September 15, 2010–January 3, 2011; and Tate Modern, London, January 19–April 25, 2011.

The exhibition is organized by Ann Temkin, Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, with Paulina Pobocha, Curatorial Assistant, Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art.

Major support for the exhibition is provided by the National Council for Culture and the Arts (CONACULTA), and Fundación Televisa, Mexico.

Additional funding is provided by MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation and by Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley.

Publications

  • Gabriel Orozco Exhibition catalogue, Hardcover, 256 pages
  • Press release 6 pages

Artist

Installation images

How we identified these works

In 2018–19, MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff.

If you notice an error, please contact us at [email protected].

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].