Gabriel Orozco

Born in Mexico, but now working mainly in New York, Gabriel Orozco engages the legacy of modernist sculpture with a kind of artistic nomadism that "succeeds in imbuing its original iconography with a fresh, poetically abstract quality, giving rise to a new object that can obviously comply with several definitions of sculpture." He borrows sculptural techniques from various phases of art history and applies them to simple things, transforming ordinary objects into sculptures in the classical sense without erasing their original status as "things." Creating personal variations on common things, he often uses altered games as a metaphor for social development and interaction. The pieces are only complete with the input of the viewer because the games have no rules; the players must bring their own rules to the game. Let's Entertain includes Horses Running Endlessly (1995), a beautiful chess table without kings, queens, bishops, rooks, or pawns. It has only the knights, the horses. In the traditional form of chess, horses can only be moved sideways, creating endless circular loops. Those attempting to play this version must choose between that fate and the possibility of creating new rules on the spot. Breaking with convention is the artist's seeming directive. As one critic has written, "[Orozco] is an activist in the sense that his daily activity confronts the shortcomings of our perception of reality." In making the familiar strange and exciting, the artist offers a poetic meditation on play, social engagement, and the ephemerality of everyday experience. Orozco's work was included in documenta X in 1997 and the 1999 Carnegie International.