Gabriel orozco biography book festival

Gabriel Orozco was born in Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, in 1962 and studied at the Escuela Nacional de Arte Plasticas in Mexico City, and at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain.

Orozco was featured at Documenta XI (2002), where his sensuous terra-cotta works explored the elegance and logic of traditional ceramics—a pointed commentary on Mexican craft and its place in a “high art” gallery space.

Orozco has shown his work at distinguished venues, including Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R.

Guggenheim Museum, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Venice Biennale. The camera angle and the cropped features of the other players place the viewer in the midst of the game, heightening the interest and investment in the actions at hand. Referring to these pairs of objects as couples, Orozco anthropomorphizes them, leaning them towards one another as if in intimate conversation or contact.

The young Orozco accompanied his father to many of the sites of these commissions. In the early 1990s while in New York, Orozco emerged as a leading figure in contemporary art, providing a welcomed change from the recent trends in expressionist painting and dramatic economic swings affecting the contemporary art world throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

The process of splitting and extending these circles was repeated until Orozco found a design he liked. In addition, the artist has replaced all of the game pieces (knights, pawns, castles, bishops, kings, and queens) with only knights, also known as horses, which are the only pieces that can "jump" over other objects as they move across the board. When confronted with both the title and the image, viewers can at once recognize the inanimate, fabricated essence of the objects in the picture and also imagine more human traits expressed by them too.

Orozco uses simple means to complicate the assumptions of what something orderly - or disorderly - looks like, revealing art's ability to resist and undermine traditional expectations.

Acrylic on canvas - Tiroche DeLeon Collection

C. He was fascinated by the atmosphere of cultural awakening taking place in Madrid at the time, noticing in his strolls around town the budding habits and features of a city reentering the global stage after nearly forty years of fascist rule.

Rather than seeing the canvas as a flat space where scenes of illusion emerge, Orozco considered the canvas and support together as a "container for action." Using a computer software program, Orozco created diagrams that started from a central point with a circle drawn around it, then expanded into several tangential circles of various sizes that were subsequently halved and quartered, dictated by the movements of the knight chess piece in both horizontal and vertical directions.

Viewers were encouraged to touch and explore the sculpture, treating the gallery space as if it were a showroom to facilitate a sale. A major retrospective of Orozco’s work was assembled at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2000 and traveled to Museo Internacional Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterey, Mexico.

Orozco does not hide the materials (wood) and other physical features of these objects, which suggest their use within a construction site or other industrial environment. Depicting banal items in ways that suggest personal histories or narratives forces the viewer to rethink the documentary role of photography and the lives of ordinary objects at the same time.

Silver dye bleach print - The Solomon R.

Guggenheim Museum, New York

C. His nomadic tendencies fuel his curiosity in the stories that surrounding places and things tell, a curiosity he encourages his audience to share by illustrating new ways to see and comprehend both natural and manmade elements in our collective experience.