Gabriel Orozco
Natural Motion
13 July–6 October 2013
Kunsthaus Bregenz
Karl-Tizian-Platz
6900 Bregenz
Austria
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. In Bregenz he 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.
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.
In addition to the predominantly new works, the Kunsthaus Bregenz is also presenting one of the artist’s most striking 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 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.
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.
KUB Arena
Back to the Future
A Week in Summer of Art, Films, and Music
5–11 August 2013
For its summer program KUB Arena is temporarily abandoning its ground floor space in the Kunsthaus, and instead using the surrounding public spaces as a stage for open-air cinema and other events. A series of fictional visions of the future, of utopias, of dystopias, as well as space operas, from the advent of the science fiction genre in film through to the present day, will be screened at an open-air cinema on Karl-Tizian-Platz between August 5 and 11, accompanied by concerts, performances, bar evenings, discussions, and dinners. Departing from early animation films, KUB Arena will be dedicating a whole week in August to a voyage through the fantastic, cosmic spheres of various eras. A curated selection of films, predominantly based on novels dealing with a future which has meanwhile become the past, will be engaging in a dialog with current artistic approaches as well as contemporary variants of the genre. The KUB Arena’s program is therefore spanning a broad spectrum of possible translations of the relativity of time and space into tangible visions. The program will not only be looking forwards but also backwards at both more, as well as less, speculative examples of cinematographic and artistic visions of the future, and also juxtaposing them against the background of our own present. The program will be opened on August 5 by the performance duo SKILLS, Camilla Milena Fehér and Sylvi Kretzschmar, who for many years have been working on experimental scenarios in a crossover of electronic music and performance. A further highlight will be the live concert by the German Chilean musician and techno producer Matias Aguayo x Mostro on August 11, which will close the summer program.
Participants, performers, and artists of the KUB Arena summer program: SKILLS, Discoteca Flaming Star, Marie-Luise Angerer (Professor for Media and Cultural Studies, Academy of Media Arts Cologne), Ritornell, Villa Design Group, Matias Aguayo x Mostro
For further information: www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at
