Gabriel Orozco

GABRIEL OROZCO 
September 12, 1994 -October 15, 1994

The Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by Gabriel Orozco opening on September 12th and continuing through October 15th. This is Orozco's first gallery exhibition in the United States. He will exhibit both new and recent works of sculpture and photography. 

Gabriel Orozco was born in Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico and later studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas in Mexico City. From 1986 to 1987 he left Mexico for Spain where he attended El Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. Gabriel Orozco lives and works in New York City and Mexico. 

Since 1986, a portion of Gabriel Orozco's work has consisted of visually subtle and deftly poetic manipulations or alterations of the visual landscape he encounters. Such works are constructed from ephemeral found objects, materials and discards found on-site. The works exist as temporary interventions in a momentary aesthetic and geopolitical context. Installed in different locations in Mexico, Belgium, Brazil, France, Holland, Italy, New York City, and Russia, they are documented with photographs. 

In a past work, Yielding Stone (1992), Orozco rolled an amorphous mass of plasticine clay along city streets collecting the dirt, dust and imprints of urban allées on its skin. Because plasticine never dries, the ball continues to collect impressions from handling and the environment on its soft, mutable surface wherever it goes. In this instance as in others, Orozco's work activates forms and procedures from American post-minimalist variants and Arte Povera, but also calls upon the Situationist urban dérive, a wander through the city spent screening and collecting its debris. Indeed, Orozco's work has strong links to late European and American avant-garde practice. 

Yet, as Benjamin Buchloh wrote in the catalog for Orozco's 1993 exhibition at the Kanaal Art Foundation in Kortrijk, Belgium, "everyone of Orozco's works immediately responds to attempts to assimilate it merely within a European or American perspective with an explicit articulation asserting both its historic and geo-political independence in terms of Orozco's cultural history." Continuing his comments on another piece, My Hands Are My Heart (1991), constructed by Orozco from "pressing and imprinting his hands into a lump of brick clay," Buchloh writes that Orozco produces "a strange hybrid between late sixties purely indexical sculptural procedures (such as the casts of body parts in Bruce Nauman's work) and the specifically Latin and Hispanic iconography of the heart." Yet, Buchloh concludes, the work counters both of these readings with its simplicity and acts to demythify such associations by emphasizing instead "self-definition in the process of production." (43) 

The show at Marian Goodman Gallery runs concurrent to Options 47: Gabriel Orozco curated by Richard Francis at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago which is on view from September 3rd until October 30th, 1994 and is accompanied by an essay by Laura J. Hoptman. 

Orozco has recently been awarded the 1995 DAAD Berlin Artist Program Fellowship. In 1994 his work was featured in a group show at Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli, and in The Epic and the Everyday: Contemporary Photographic Art at the Hayward Gallery in London. Orozco had one-person exhibitions in 1993 at the Kanaal Art Foundation in Kortrijk, Belgium and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He was also featured in the 1993 Venice Biennale Aperto. In 1992 his work was included in America, Bride of the Sun at the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp. 

Please join us for a reception for the artist on Friday, September 16th from 6pm to 8pm. 

For further information and/or photographs, please contact Jeannie Freilich-Sondik at (212) 977-7160. 

Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday 10am to 6pm.