Gabriel Orozco: Inner Circles of the Wall

November 29, 2007–March 30, 2008

Gayle and Paul Stoffel Gallery

This fall the Dallas Museum of Art hosts an installation by the internationally influential Mexican conceptual and installation artist Gabriel Orozco. Gabriel Orozco: Inner Circles of the Wall will premiere a sculptural installation by this important artist. Orozco, who uses multiple media that includes installation, photography, video and sculpture, has a keen interest in geometry. This exhibition will highlight the circle motif that recurs throughout the artist’s work in both literal and compositional forms.

Orozco is known for blurring the boundaries between the conceptual and the formal, suggesting complex systems and ideas that re-imagine everyday objects and images. He has been extremely influential on a younger generation of artists in Mexico and internationally.

For the Dallas installation, Orozco had masons cut a plaster wall in his Paris gallery into numerous parts. He then drew precise graphite circles that just touch the irregular edges of these pieces, and then placed the pieces on the gallery floor and against the walls. Inner Circles of the Wall suggests the here and now of bare matter, as well as the beauty of the infinite realms of a perfect and perfectly logical geometry.

“Orozco’s work challenges our ideas of how a work of art is made, while it also follows a recent line of thought in the history of art, particularly sculpture,” said Charles Wylie, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Throughout his career, Orozco’s use of video, drawings, photographs, sculptures and installations have allowed the viewer to explore the creative associations between objects we often ignore. He is known for creating pieces that allow the very rare interaction between viewers and artwork.

Orozco was born in 1962 in Jalapa, Veracruz in Mexico. He studied at both the Escuela Nacional de Arte Plasticas in Mexico City and the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain. The artist maintains homes in New York, Paris and Mexico City, but does not maintain a studio. He is interested in the accidental, and instead uses his freedom and mobility to create art on-site, reacting directly to the gallery spaces and outdoor environments.

He was the recipient of the Seccio Espacios Alternativos prize at the Salon Nacional de Artes Plasticas in Mexico City in 1987, a DAAD artist-in-residence grant in Berlin in 1995, and the German Blue Orange prize in 2006.

Gabriel Orozco: The Inner Circles of the Wall is organized by the Dallas Museum of Art.

Exhibition support is provided by the Donor Circle membership program through a leadership gift of Fanchon and Howard Hallam. Air transportation provided by American Airlines.

Image: Gabriel Orozco, Inner Circles of the Wall, 1999, plaster and pencil, exhibition view at the Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, courtesy of the artist & Galerie Chantal Crousel, photo: Florian Kleinefenn