Natural Motion. New works and the artist's most spectacular installations: Imposing Whale Skeleton. Orozco's pronounced sensibility for cultural and national or state attributions is seen in his incorporating antithetical elements into his practice of art. On the one hand, he selects motifs, techniques, and references; on the other, he employs artistic strategies that were developed by modernism.
Curators: Yilmaz Dziewior and Rudolf Sagmeister
Born in 1962 in Xalapa in the Mexican state of Veracruz,
and living today in New York, Paris, and Mexico City,
Gabriel Orozco is one of the best-known international
artists of his generation. Following a major retrospective
from 2009 to 2011, which was on view at the New York
Museum of Modern Art, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the
Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Tate Modern in London,
in Bregenz Orozco will be showing for the most part new
works that have been conceived specially for the exhibition.
Gabriel Orozco is that rare artist who can switch between
classical, quasi-autonomous paintings or sculptures and
transient, seemingly improvised installations, interventions, objects, and photographs. Enormously versatile in
approach, he sometimes draws on atmospherically charged,
found, or occasionally casual situations and objects, as well
as the exact opposite: the production of precise and perfectly crafted objects. Hence, his works take up a position
between analytic conceptual art and formally as well as
sensually balanced artifacts. Rational engagement and the
physical experience of the immediate emotional encounter
with his works enter into dialog in Orozco’s oeuvre.
From the very start of his career, Orozco produced such
icons of contemporary art as the photographic work
My Hands Are My Heart (1991) or La DS (1993), a radically
slimed Citroën DS. His early projects such as Yoghurt Caps
(1994), or Parking Lot (1995), which used a ground-floor
gallery as a garage, are no less legendary.
Orozco’s pronounced sensibility for cultural and national or
state attributions is seen in his incorporating antithetical
elements into his practice of art. On the one hand, he selects motifs, techniques, and references, for instance, that
are specifically Mexican or that are deeply rooted in Latin-American cultural traditions; on the other, he employs
artistic strategies that were developed by modernism. He
insists on cultural distinctions, while at the same time developing works that call into question over-rigid, identity-
imposing definitions.
Hence, his new stone sculptures confidently stand in the
modernist tradition of European sculpture from Hans Arp
and Brancusi to Barbara Hepworth, and yet they can also
be seen as expressing precisely the engagement with indigenous cultures. Orozco highlights this relation to these
extra-European roots by, among other things, presenting
his stone sculptures in a way that distantly recalls an
anthropological museum’s atmospheric style of display.
In addition to the predominantly new works, the Kunsthaus
Bregenz is also presenting one of the artist’s most spectacular installations. At its first presentation in London nearly
seven years ago, his almost fifteen-meter-long synthetic
resin reconstruction of the skeleton of a whale caused a
sensation. The inspiration for the sculpture was a whale
that had stranded on the southwest coast of Spain. The
artist covered the artificial bones of the mammal with a
complex geometrical pattern in graphite and thus set up a
dialog between art and the whale’s nature-bound, creaturely aura.
This work also brings out clearly Orozco’s interest in traditional customs, rites, and cultures that are close to nature.
At the same time, however, it can be viewed as an extrapolation of the concept of the readymade, a concept central
to modern art, which the artist has paradoxically updated
for the present day by referencing traditions that lie far in
the past.
A further highpoint of the Bregenz exhibition is a new
work by Orozco that cites one of his best-known earlier
works in a modified version. With this startling conceptual
gesture the artist not only questions his own reception –
he at the same time puts the current validity of his already
twenty-year oeuvre to the test.
By including a number of his earlier works in his Bregenz
exhibition, Orozco anchors his new works in his own history, allowing viewers to engage more deeply with his characteristic practice of spanning all genres and media.
Following the show at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Gabriel
Orozco’s exhibition will be on view at the Moderna Museet,
Stockholm.
Kunsthaus Bregenz Presents Imposing Whale Skeleton
A spectacular installation by Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco
A gray whale stranded on the Spanish coast was the inspiration for Gabriel Orozco’s sensational, almost fifteen meter long work. The giant whale skeleton installation has
permitted the artist to create an impressive composition
that merges art and nature. Initially the enormous bones
had to be appropriately prepared by a team of experts. In
order to counter any possible decay of the whale skeleton,
life-size reproductions of the individual bones were faithfully cast in artificial resin. Following this process lasting
three months, Orozco had the Dark Wave skeleton completely covered with dynamic graphite drawings. With the
assistance of a group of art students, concentric circles
were applied individually to the bones. A close examination of the fascinating skeleton reveals complex geometrical patterns resembling those of waves expanding from a
stone thrown into water. The skeleton, suspended by steel
cables, is reminiscent of an enormous mobile and offers
visitors to the Kunsthaus the unique opportunity to encounter an enormous giant of the ocean at eye level. In this
work Gabriel Orozco has demonstrated the elementary
power of nature, whilst also referencing ancient myths and
biblical narratives.
KUB Billboards
Gabriel Orozco 01 - 07 > 06 10 2013 Seestraße Bregenz
Gabriel Orozco works with rocks that hold within themselves a long history. These are river stones, originating
from the coast of Guerrero in Mexico. The rounded stones
are a variation of a theme to which the artist constantly
returns: the circle as the beginning of things, and all its
derivatives: the sphere, the ball, the disc, the wheel, the
planet, the orbit. They are bodies that speak of what the
circle speaks: mobility, cycles, games, fullness, rotation.
Their natural form and beauty persists while the carved
geometrical patterns permit a tactile and visual comparison
of the textures that exist within the rock and its history of
natural motion: the rough outside crust eroded by nature,
versus the polished internal surfaces carved by man. But
what diminishes the original materiality of the stone is
precisely what increases the sense of the work (it stops
being a stone to become a sculpture).
Image: Dark Wave, 2006. Calcium carbonate and resin with graphite 304 x 392 x 1375 cm. Installation view groundfloor Kunsthaus Bregenz 2013 Lender Essl Museum Klosterneuburg/Vienna Photo ©: Christian Hinz
Communications
Birgit Albers ext. -413 b.albers@kunsthaus-bregenz.at
Press Conference Thursday, July 11, 12 noon
Opening Friday, July 12, 2013, 7 p.m.
Kunsthaus Bregenz
Karl-Tizian-Platz 6900 Bregenz Austria
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Thursday 10 a.m.—9 p.m.
July 13 to September 1 daily 10 a.m—8 p.m.
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