LOS ANGELES Gabriel Orozco, the first major survey of internationally renowned artist Gabriel Orozco, opens ]une 4, 2000, at The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) at California Plaza (250 South Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles) and remains on view through September 3, 2000.

Spanning Orozco's varied artistic production from 1990 to 2000, the exhibition includes sculpture, photography, video, installation, and drawing.

Organized by MOCA assistant curator Alma Ruiz, the exhibition will include over 100 works that highlight the artist's use of diverse media and eclectic subject matter. The exhibition provides an overview of Orozco's multifaceted body of work, which celebrates unexpected associations and conceptual links.
Orozco takes his cues from ordinary, often urban, settings and from found or industrially fabricated materials. A rubber inner tube, a ball of plasticine, a tin of cat food, or the cap of a yogurt container are subtly transformed in Orozco's hands. With modest materials in unexpected combinations, he creates significant objects that celebrate the discarded and mundane in contemporary life.

Orozco's sculptures often attempt to contain and distinguish space. Yielding Stone (1992), a large plasticine ball that the artist has rolled through city streets picking up dust and debris, is the same weight as the artist. In Paris in 1993, Orozco cut a classic Citroen lengthwise into three pieces, removed the middle portion, and fitted the remaining two pieces together. Every piece was precisely cut and reconstructed to make the origina! car exactly 62 centimeters thinner. La DS (pronounced like Ia deesse, French for 'goddess') is a remodeled European icon.

The exhibition will also feature several large-scale works that explore the dynamics of games, a theme often found in Orozco's work. Ping Pond Table (1998), a Ping-Pong table with a lily pond in the center, can be played by two to four players. Oval with Pendulum (1996), modifies the game of billiards, popular in France, with a suspended ball. Orozco also manipulates a series of photographs of men playing rugby, cricket, and soccer taken from the London Times. Known as The Atomists, the works feature these images blown up to life-size proportions and overlaid with colored circles and elliptical shapes, recurrent motifs in the artist's work.

Orozco's photographs are categorized into those that record chance encounters or found objects and those that capture the artist's own interventions. Until You Find Another Yellow Schwalbe (1995) details a series of coincidences between identical mopeds in Berlin. Some photographs show actions by Orozco that last only as long as the time for him to take the picture-the artist's breath fogging the surface of a polished piano in Breath on Piano (1993) or the circles created after he rides his bicycle through two puddles in Extension of Reflection (1992).

Background on the Artist

Born in 1962 in Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, Orozco lives in New York and Mexico City. Acclaimed for his contributions to international group exhibitions such as the 1993 Venice Biennale, the 1995 Whitney Biennial, and the 1997 Documenta X, Orozco has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Kanaal Art Foundation in Kortrijk, Belgium, the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Ia Ville de Paris. Orozco studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas, UNAM, in Mexico from 1981 to 1984 and at the Circulo de Bellas
Artes in Madrid from 1986 to 1987.

Publication

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication, Gabriel Omzco, published by MOCA in collaboration with the Consejo Nacional para Ia Cultura y las Artes (CONACULTA) and the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (INBA) in Mexico City. This bilingual, fully illustrated 210-page catalogue features an artist's project by Damian Ortega and essays by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, professor of art history at Columbia University and editor of October, Abraham Cruzvillegas, artist and professor of art history at the ENAP in Mexico City; Gabriel Kuri, writer and artist; Molly Nesbit, associate professor of art at Vassar College and a contributing editor at Artforum; and MOCA assistant curator Ruiz. It also includes an exhibition chronology and bibliography.

Exhibition Tour

Following its presentation at MOCA, the exhibition will travel to the Museo de Arte Contempora'neo Internacional Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City (September 28, 2000 to February 4, 2001) and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey (MARCO) (February 22 to May 27, 2001) in Monterrey, Mexico.