Artist in focus: Gabriel Orozco

February 2011

Gabriel Orozco is Mexico's foremost living sculptor and conceptualist artist. His subversive and challenging aesthetic can be seen in all aspects of his life and work; from his "not-a-studio but an operating centre" space in New York to the everyday items used to bewilder and alienate his audience.

He was born in 1962, in Jalapa, Veracruz. His father was a mural painter and an art professor, his mother a classical pianist. Orozco received strict traditional training at the National School of Plastic Arts, graduating in 1984. An interest in photography deepened in 1985, after the earthquake in Mexico City, when, on long walks through devastated neighbourhoods, he took pictures of debris. In 1986, frustrated by the insular nationalism of the local art scene, he moved to Madrid and travelled in Europe. The art and the ideas of Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, Piero Manzoni, and John Cage inspired him. He began to find or to concoct, and then to photograph, appearances of things in city streets.

"I come from a country where a lot of art is labelled surrealist. I grew up with it and I hate that kind of dreamlike, evasive, easy, poetic, sexual, cheesy surrealist practice," he declares. "I try to be a realist," he adds. "There is humour in my work but I'm not playing cynical games or flirting with the art world or engaging with the frivolity of the market."

Over the years, he has used various teams of people and a wide range of materials - cutting up and re-assembling a Citroen DS, in La DS (1993) which will feature in the upcoming Tate Modern exhibition. Six years ago he transitioned from photography to paintings, notably his elegant abstract "Samurai Tree" series (2006) in lustrous shades of gold, red, white and blue.

Currently his walls and space are decorated with brightly coloured artworks including paper boomerangs, and acrylic washes on life size rolls of rice paper, scissors, binoculars, bowls that say "bon voyage" and cans of spray paint sit on a counter in anticipation of his upcoming solo show which opened at the Tate Modern, London on 19 January.

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