Gabriel Orozco
thinking in circles
1 August–18 October 2013
The Fruitmarket Gallery
45 Market Street
Edinburgh, EH1 1DF
Scotland
www.fruitmarket.co.uk
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Curated by Briony Fer
Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962, Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico) 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 is delighted to be able to present this new exhibition of Orozco’s work. Curated by art historian and writer Briony Fer, it is the product of an ongoing 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 will 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.
New publication
Gabriel Orozco: thinking in circles
Published by The Fruitmarket Gallery to accompany the exhibition, this major book by curator Briony Fer focuses on the themes and ideas in the exhibition. 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.
Buy here.
Gabriel Orozco was born in Veracruz in 1962, and 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.
Briony Fer is a Professor of History of Art at University College London. She is a respected writer on contemporary art, and has written several times on Gabriel Orozco’s work. Most recently, she contributed ‘Notes on the Notebooks: Constellations in Dust: Notes on the Notebooks’ to the Tate/MOMA/Pompidou Gabriel Orozco retrospective catalogue. In 2009, Briony Fer curated Eva Hesse, Studiowork at The Fruitmarket Gallery.
