Cemetery #1

2002 - Photography (Photography)
40,6 x 50,8 cm

Gabriel Orozco

location: New York City, Paris

location: Mexico

year born: 1962

gender: male

nationality: Mexican

home town: Jalapa, Mexico

Gabriel Orozco comments: “In the exhibition [Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002], I tried to connect with the photographs I took in Mali in July. I traveled to Mali for three weeks and took some photographs related to my work. They are very different, but there are links as the graveyard of Timbuktu, which I discovered during the trip. I found the cemetery because I was interested in pottery and ceramics. Research traditions of ceramics were the reason for my trip to Africa in Mali, to understand, learn, appreciate what they did, because it is an important tradition in Mali. And then I discovered the cemetery in Timbuktu. It is interesting to see how the work will take you to discover places you would never have discovered if you did not work. So the link between what you do and what you find in a second time is very interesting. In this context, the exhibition presents one hand tables with ceramics. In addition, photographs of Mali are on the walls. There is no direct link. But it is obvious that the same person who is interested in these things. And there are many reasons for this.

Gabriel Orozco could be described as a traveler-artist, without a fixed studio. He works following contexts and produces work that flows. “Special Service” (1997) is a collage on a plane ticket, and indicates nomadism, between territories. The artist, who is the son of muralist Mario Orozco Riviera, questions the boundaries of his artistic identity in Mexico. In “Crazy tourist” (1991), Orozco creates a situation with oranges in the Brazilian market tables in a desert. The artist uses objects or “poor” situations, found in the everyday landscape, natural or urban. By their division, their juxtaposition, or collage, inventing semantic or sensitive scenarios, always surprising, sometimes humorous and sometimes lyrical … The sculptural practice of the artist, inseparable from his drawings, photographs, or films, invents relationships of space, and disrupts our perception of objects. Such is the case of “Yielding Stone” (1992), a photo of a plasticine ball, the weight of the artist, rolled through the streets of New York. Gabriel Orozco was born in 1962 in Jalapa, Mexico. He lives and works in New York, Mexico, and Paris.