Working through drawing, photography, sculpture and installation, Orozco draws from everyday materials and circumstances from his own encounters and routines. Playing with ideas of accessibility, his work revolves around recurrent themes and explores materials with multiplicity that allows the viewer’s imagination to discover creative associations between aspects of everyday life often overlooked or ignored. From the beginning of his career, Orozco’s nomadic lifestyle effected both the production and aesthetic of his work. His lack of a primary ‘home base’ lent a more fluid aspect to his production, allowing for the growth of a rich heteronomy of materials and themes marked by a conceptual openness to spontaneity and circumstance. Although it might be difficult to describe Orozco’s work in terms of a physical outcome – the artist has more of an interest in questions rather than statements, and emphasizes the potential within mutating materials, forms and meanings.
Gabriel Orozco was born in Jalapa in the Mexican state of Veracruz in 1962, to an artistic left-wing family that moved to Mexico City during his childhood. He studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico, UNAM (1981-1984) and at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid (1986-1987).