Orozco: Natural Motion

“Gabriel Orozco - Natural Motion” is an exhibition that gives an overview of an entire oeuvre.

It is a distinctly precise retrospective, where Moderna Museet have selected key works together with the artist from his entire production. A characteristic feature of Gabriel Orozco’s approach is his way of using familiar objects and making us experience them in a new light by means of shifts of various kinds. In this way, he gives us new perspectives on the objects around us.

In addition to the recent works, the exhibition also features one of Orozco’s most spectacular installations, Dark Wave (2006). When his nearly 15-metre long reconstruction of a whale skeleton, made of calcium carbonate and resin, was first shown in London nearly seven years ago, it caused a great commotion. A stranded whale on the south-west coast of Spain inspired this sculpture. The artist covered the artificial bones of the mammal with a complex geometrical pattern in graphite and thus set up a dialogue between art and the whale’s nature-bound, creaturely aura. This work also highlights Orozco’s interest in traditional customs, rites and cultures that are close to nature. But it can also be viewed as a readymade, a concept central to modern art, and one which Orozco paradoxically revitalises by linking it to traditions in the distant past.

Another prominent piece in the exhibition is La DS Cornaline (2013), a new version of a work created originally in 1993. The colour is different from the pale-grey original; the deep-red 1960s Citroën DS has been sliced into three sections lengthwise, the middle section removed and the two outer sections rejoined to create a more compressed, dynamic body, but without the engine that would have set it in motion. Motion, more or less natural, also features in many of the photographs by Gabriel Orozco. Photography forms a special category in his oeuvre, as it frequently is the remaining documentation of an enactment. One of his most famous series is Until You Find Another Yellow Schwalbe (1995), which consists of 40 photos of yellow motorbikes parked two by two. While living in Berlin, Orozco would travel around the city on his yellow motorcycle, photographing his own next to every identical Schwalbe he found. The result is 39 photographs; the 40th and final image is from when he organised an open meet for all Schwalbe owners. Only two showed up, and his own bike made three.

from February 14 until May 4, 2014
Gabriel Orozco
Natural Motion
curated by Ann-Sofi Noring
produced by Kunsthaus Bregenz in association with Moderna Museet
Moderna Museet
Exercisplan 4, Stockholm