Metropolitan Museum Presents Gabriel Orozco

Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962, Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico) is a peripatetic artist with studios in Mexico City, New York City, and Paris. Just as his life is characterized by frequent traversing of countries and borders, his artistic practice crosses the boundaries between photography, sculpture, drawing, installation, and video.

Since the 1980s, Orozco has carried a camera with him to record unexpected moments of fragile and poetic beauty, as well as the ephemeral sculptures he makes on his local walks and travels around the world. The Metropolitan's exhibition, Gabriel Orozco, on view from May 15 through September 3, 2007, will feature approximately 40 of Orozco's works from the early 1990s to the present, including photographs, sculptures, and works on paper from the Met's collection and on loan from local collections.

"For more than a decade, the Metropolitan has been acquiring photographs by Gabriel Orozco, each a small and wonderful visual epiphany," commented Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge of the Department of Photographs. "This exhibition is an opportunity to feature these photographs and others within the broader context of the artist's endlessly inventive use of materials and eclectic subject matter."

Orozco's photography is closely related to his sculpture, especially his subtle manipulations of found objects. In the trompe l'oeil photograph Knife on Glass (2000), the artist has leaned a butter knife on a nearly invisible glass window to make the knife appear to be floating magically. Through photography, the artist also documents his fleeting interventions: a pyramid of sand on a table, a white shoebox on a blanket of snow, and clay bearing the imprint of his hand. On his journeys and encounters, Orozco uses photography as a form of visual note-taking as he happens upon intriguing traces of life. In Waiting Chairs (1998), Orozco has found a ghostly pattern of hair-oil stains above a row of chairs in Calcutta's National Museum.

Cemetery (2002) captures an unassuming yet surprising landscape that resembles one of his sculptures: dozens of round terracotta pots, used as grave markers and receptacles for offerings, lay scattered across on the desert sand of Timbuktu. The mindful openness of the artist's working process and the photographs he makes on his everyday wanderings encourage a heightened awareness of the fleeting beauty to be found in simple objects and chance occurrences.

Gabriel Orozco has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Centro Fotográfico Alvarez Bravo, Oaxaca, Mexico; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Kanaal Art Foundation, Kortrijk, Belgium, among other museums. His work was also featured in the Venice Biennale (1993 and 2003); Whitney Biennial (1995); and Documenta (1993 and 2002).
Gabriel Orozco is organized by Mia Fineman, Senior Research Associate, and Malcolm Daniel, Curator in Charge, both of the Metropolitan Museum's Department of Photographs. -- www.metmuseum.org