EDINBURGH.- Gabriel Orozco (born Jalapa, Veracruz, 1962) is one of the foremost international artists of our age. Rising to prominence in the early 1990s, he has developed a consistently innovative practice, making work which not only captures the imagination but also powerfully engages with key material and conceptual issues of what it is to make art now.
The Fruitmarket Gallery presents this new exhibition of Orozco’s work. Curated by art historian and writer Briony Fer, it is the product of an on-going conversation between her and the artist.
The exhibition started with a fairly simple yet nonetheless unusual exercise: to take one work and see how far it is possible to think with it rather than about it. The work is the 2005 painting The Eye of Go, and thinking with it involves looking right back to the 1990s and an extraordinary sequence of paintings on acetate that are only now being exhibited for the first time, and forward to paintings and a series of river stone sculptures that Orozco has started making since the conversation around this exhibition began.
Rather than surveying the whole range of Orozco’s practice, the exhibition seeks to cut a conceptual slice through it, to look deeply into the mechanics of the artist’s thinking and working process. Not only does the exhibition propose a different view of Orozco’s major contribution to changes in art in the 1990s but bring to the fore the urgent problem of art’s ‘makeability’ now.
A new publication accompanies the exhibition. Published by The Fruitmarket Gallery, the book features new writing by the curator of the exhibition, Professor Briony Fer focused around the themes and ideas in the show – placing the work, The Eye of Go, at the centre of her thought, Fer asks how far it is possible to think with the work rather than about it. Fully illustrated with many images published here for the first time and new photography made by the artist specially for the book, this is an important addition to current scholarship on Orozco’s work.
Gabriel Orozco was born in Veracruz, Mexico in 1962. Lives and works internationally. He studied at Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. Following his first exhibition in 1983, Orozco has had solo exhibitions at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1995 and 1998, the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2004, and the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico, in 2006, as well as travelling retrospectives at the Kunsthalle Zürich in 1996-97 and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2000–01. He has participated in the Venice Biennale (1993, 2003, and 2005), the Whitney Biennial (1997), and Documenta X (1997) and 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). Gabriel Orozco is represented by the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York, kurimanzutto in Mexico City, Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris and White Cube in London.
