Whale of a Show

Gabriel Orozco's Triumphant Return to MoMA

It is only fitting that Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco returns for a survey of his career to the museum that gave the then-little-known 31-year-old creative mind a start. Orozco’s show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art is far more expansive and planned than his first show at the museum 16 years ago—remembered most for its orange display in the windows of the buildings across from MoMA. In the nearly two decades that followed, Orozco’s work has lead up to the mammoth focus of this upcoming exhibition Mobile Matrix—a whale skeleton with inscriptions, using 6,000 mechanical-pencil leads, affixed into a metal structure. The husband, father, and international art star has come a long way from the New York University dorm room he was crashing at during his first exhibit—in 2001, The New Yorker deemed him “the leading conceptual and installation artist of his generation,” whose work has also been displayed at the Guggenheim and the Whitney. In regard to this retrospective, however, Orozco tells The New York Times: “It’s very important to look back, like a scientist who studies his experiments and sees what worked and what didn’t. And then, of course, it’s important to forget. And I am very good at that, forgetting.”