Gabriel Orozco at Tate Modern

Gabriel Orozco’s world is one where nothing is what it seems- or rather where things shouldn’t be what they seem.

Merging the world’s cultures with his Latin American heritage to create innovative and experimental works of cultural and artistic relevance, Orozco’s playful interactions with the everyday – an elevator, a bicycle, a phone book – inject new life, and new uses, into those objects we rarely notice. In his largest retrospective in the UK to date, the Tate Modern has given Mexican artist Orozco an extended playtime.

In this increasingly disposable age, Orozco’s work shows a determination to bring life into even the most useless, or deceased. In Black Kites, the chaos of death is revitalised with a regimented geometric pattern, painstakingly applied with a pencil to a human skull.

Lintels, an eerie installation of washing lines filled with reclaimed lint from dryers, composed of hair and skin, ashen remnants of human life given new purpose, is all the more resonant when placed in the context of post 9/11 society.

This idea of reclaiming death into life can be seen in the Obit Series, where excerpts from newspaper obituaries are blown up onto Japanese paper, devoid of personality and reduced to garish headlines where a ‘Philosopher, Author and Friend of Popes’ sits alongside ‘Wrote Novels of the Paranormal’.

In Dial Tone, 10m of Japanese paper are pasted with thin strips of the New York phone book, combining ancient Oriental traditions with modern technology, creating a certain frustration to see usefulness perverted in such an albeit beautiful way. Similarly, the iconic La D.S, the spliced silver Citroen DS and impressively welded collage Four Bicycles (There is Always One Direction) removes their original function in place of a new one. With this definite theme of transportation, particularly in the sculptures, perhaps it’s Orozco’s way of saying there’s always more than one way to get to a destination…

Movement embodies Orozco’s work, whether it be physical transportation or more metaphorical through the infinite design of a circle. As in Black Kites, geometric patterns and rules dominate the exhibition, from vibrant printed canvases to his reinvention of the rules of chess in Horses Run Endlessly, where knights become trapped in an endless game – and even in the circular curation of the yellow Schwalbe series. Life will always find a way to keep moving.

But for me, the standout pieces aren’t the iconic sculptures but Orozco’s stunning photographic series. The cleverly hung Until You Find Another Yellow Schwalbe is an extensive collection of photographs charting Orozco’s adventures around Berlin hunting for matching yellow scooters, arranged in a circle letting us follow Orozco’s journey around the city. Through his camera, Orozco beautifully captures the life and energy of the world in even the most static of moments using unusual angles – the underside of a shower head, the back end of a horse – to offer unusual interpretations and visions of the everyday.

While Orozco’s work subverts our conception of the everyday, it is unobtrusive – as exemplified by the empty shoebox in the centre of the main gallery. Yet, judging by the fact my friend tripped over said ‘unobtrusive’ shoebox, we see the case and point – no object is truly unobtrusive, everything has a use, it might not be its intended use, or it might be one Orozco made up, but there will always be a place for it.

Gabriel Orozco’s exhibition continues until April 25 at:

Tate Modern
South Bank
SE1 9TG

Image: ‘Black Kites’ (1997) © Courtesy of Gabriel Orozco