Gabriel Orozco
Gabriel Orozco (born April 27, 1962) is a Mexican artist. He gained his reputation in the early 1990s with his exploration of drawing, photography, sculpture and installation. In 1998, Francesco Bonami called Orozco "one of the most influential artists of this decade, and probably the next one too." Biography. Early life and education. Orozco was born in 1962 in Veracruz, Mexico to Cristina Félix Romandía and Mario Orozco Rivera, a mural painter and art professor at the University of Veracruz. When Orozco was six, the family relocated to the San Ángel neighborhood of Mexico City so that his  father could work with artist David Alfaro Siquieros on various mural commissions. His father took him along to museum exhibitions and to work with him, during which time Orozco overheard many conversations about art and politics. Orozco attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas between 1981 and 1984 but found the program too conservative. In 1986, he moved to Madrid and enrolled at the Circulo de Bellas Artes. There his instructors introduced him to a broad range of post-war artists working in non-traditional formats. He said of his time in Spain, "What's important is to be confronted  deeply with another culture. And also to feel that I am the Other, not the resident. That I am the immigrant. I was displaced and in a country where the relationship with Latin America is conflicted. I came from a background that was very progressive. And then to travel to Spain and confront a very conservative society that also wanted to be very avant-garde in the 1980s, but treated me as an immigrant, was shocking. That feeling of vulnerability was really important for developing my work. I think a lot of my work has to do with that kind  of exposure, to expose vulnerability and make that your strength." Career. In 1987, Orozco returned from his studies in Madrid to Mexico City, where he hosted weekly meetings with a group of other artists including Damián Ortega, Gabriel Kuri, Abraham Cruzvillegas and Dr. Lakra. This group met once a week for five years and over time the artist's home became a place where many artistic and cultural projects took shape. Orozco's nomadic way of life began to inform his work strongly around this time, and he took considerable inspiration from exploring the streets. His early practice was intended  to break away from the mainstream work of the 1980s, which was often created in huge studios with many assistants and elaborate techniques of production and distribution. In contrast, Orozco typically worked alone or with one or two other assistants. His work revolves around many repeated themes and techniques that incorporate real life and common objects. The exploration of his chosen materials allows the audience's imagination to explore the creative associations between oft-ignored objects in today's world. "For him [Orozco], the decentralization of the manufacturing practice mirrors a rich heterogeneity of object and material. There is no  way to identify a work by Orozco in terms of physical product. Instead it must be discerned through leitmotifs and strategies that constantly recur, but in always mutating forms and configurations." – Ann Temkin "What is most important is not so much what people see in the gallery or the museum, but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again."- Gabriel Orozco from an interview with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Gabriel Orozco married Maria Gutierrez on August 2, 1994, at City Hall in New York. They have one son, Simόn, born in November 2004. Orozco lives  and works in New York, Mexico and France. Exhibitions. Important solo exhibitions have included his mid-career retrospective which began in December 2009 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and traveled to the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and ended at the Tate Modern, London, in May 2011. Other recent solo exhibitions include "Asterisms", Deutsche Guggenheim (2012) and the Guggenheim, New York (2012), exhibitions at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City (2006); the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2006), Palacio de Cristal, the Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, (2005), the Hirshhorn Museum , Washington D.C. (2004), and the Serpentine Gallery, London (2004). Among his most recent solo exhibitions we can mention: "Gabriel Orozco (OROXXO)", kurimanzutto, Mexico City, Mexico 2017; "Gabriel Orozco", Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, United States (2016); "Fleurs Fantômes", Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, France (2015-2016); "Gabriel Orozco – Inner Cycles", at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo MOT, Tokyo, Japan (2015); "Natural Motion" at the Kunstahaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria (2013); which also travelled to the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden in 2014; "Thinking in Circles" at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland, (2013). Orozco participated in the Venice Biennale in 1993, 2003 , and 2005, the Whitney Biennial (1995 and 1997), as well as Documenta X (1997) and Documenta XI (2002). He has received numerous awards, including the Seccio Espacios Alternativos prize at the Salon Nacional de Artes Plasticas in Mexico City (1987), a DAAD artist-in-residence grant in Berlin (1995), and the German Blue Orange prize (2006). Bibliography. A list of select publications include: