Gabriel Orozco’s diverse and playful practice, which includes sculpture, photography, painting and video, explores philosophical conundrums through random encounters and spatial relationships.

Using everyday things in the contemporary urban environment, Orozco makes visible the poetry of chance connections, whimsy and paradox. Orozco works with found materials or situations – a ball of clay, a deflated football, an abandoned kite – that he alters then photographs to create surprising, often humorous scenarios from the simple, quotidian means. His interest in mapping and geometry is evident in works such as The Atomists, a series of sporting images cut from newspapers, overlaid with coloured ellipses and spheres, forms that are an essential part of Orozco’s artistic lexicon. More recently, in his paintings, Orozco has explored the phenomenology of structures, in which the symbol of the circle acts as a bridge between geometry and organic matter, and the sequencing of colour is based on the principles of movement within a game of chess.

Gabriel Orozco was born in 1962 in Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico and lives and works in New York, Paris and Mexico City. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, USA (1999), Documenta XI, Kassel, Germany (2002) and the 50th and 51st Venice Biennale (2003 and 2005), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2007), MUAC, Mexico (2008), Museu da Cidade, Lisbon and the Powerplant, Toronto (2009) and the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2010).

Solo exhibitions include Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (1999), Museo Internacional Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City (2001), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2001), Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC (2004), Serpentine Gallery, London (2004), Palacio Cristal, Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2005), Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Mexico (2006), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009), Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel (2010) and Tate Modern, London (2011).