contemporary art

December 13, 2009–March 1, 2010

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.