Introducing Gabriel Orozco

I first discovered Gabriel Orozco’s (b. 1962) work at the Serpentine gallery in 2004, my most distinctive memory being of his harlequin skull, Black Kites, 1997 (see above), which is featured again as part of his current Tate Modern retrospective. Well before Damien Hirst and the cool fetish of the skull, Orozco was earnestly taking found objects and altering them with a systematic approach akin to the rules of a game. Much of the work displayed in his retrospective shares this in common.

One gallery is filled with pictures of seemingly abstract geometric shapes and projection lines painted onto newspaper clippings of sportsmen, but the patterns also serve to highlight the game’s structure and the subject’s physically or next move, much like a pundit’s post-game dissection of a certain play. Next door hangs another work comprising a series of obituary titles Orozco found and randomly printed onto large reams of paper. By removing only the names and dates the deceased appear without order or hierarchy but his little game of leaving us guessing ‘who’s who’ – some are obviously famous – reminds us of the internal struggle we all have with control over death or memory as we are dependant upon and subject to just a few chosen words left to describe us. On a lighter note, the following gallery presents a car with its middle section removed to emphasise its stream-like design and an abandoned lift that has been cut down to the artist’s own height, both familiar objects but with something of the uncanny that leaves one a little unsettled.>

Orozco often uses his own body as an ingredient within his work, it helps to maintain a consistent frame of reference and set parameters for the beginning or end of a piece, with which all artists struggle. For example, Yeliding Stone, 1992, is a large plasticine ball equal to his own weight and covered in dirt, because he pushed it through the streets of New York, which becomes a unique form of documentation of his journey through the city.

Though much of the artist’s work employs humour, his playful interventions and experiments in game theory are more complex than they first appear, his titles often inferring a more subtle and serious side. Horses Running Endlessly, 1995, is one such example. This comprises a chess set consisting entirely of knights, which I understood as a metaphor for the wider concepts of competition and there being no real ‘winner’. More beautiful, perhaps, was his installation Chicotes, 2011, a series of old or burnt rubber tyres poured over with melted aluminium systematically laid out in rows and which takes up an entire gallery of the exhibition. Though the materials are recognisably industrial and taken from the roadsides of Mexico, their placement, upturned like roots or rocks, make the disintegrated tatters of rubber appear like death in a desert.

Whether you enjoy this exhibition because of its interactive nature, playful manipulations of the every day, conceptual value or even plain aesthetics, there is something for everyone. Orozco’s work empathetically demonstrates our desire to place order and structure into nature’s unpredictability with the scale of a man’s own body, and where he cannot, and we have failed, he calls us to admire its subtle idiosyncrasies.  

Image credit: Black Kites by Gabriel Orozco, 1997. Graphite on skull, 21.6 x 12.7 x 15.9 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift (by exchange) of Mr. and Mrs. James P. Magill, 1997 © Courtesy of the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; and kurimanzutto, Mexico City. 

Gabriel Orozco is on at Tate Modern until Monday 11 April 2011. www.tate.org.uk/modern

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