Untitled

The exhibition contained La DS Cornaline (1993), a Citroën that had been cut in two with the centre part then being removed and the remaining sections being spliced together as a slender and yet abbreviated version of the French national car. The artist produced a remake of “the original” for the museum’s show. The maroon artefact posed new questions about the notions of the original and the copy while inviting introspection and demonstrating skilled craftsmanship all in a single work. The piece also provides an associative link with Marcel Duchamp, as in Orozco’s retrospective held at MoMA in New York in 2009, when the lid of a yoghurt carton was provocatively exhibited as an objet d’art on its own.

In the six works by Gabriel Orozco in Moderna Museet's collection, circles, semi-circles and quarter-circles reoccur, sometimes painted on unrefined materials such as plastic film, a photocopy or a plane ticket. The circles in his sketchbooks are a kind of exercise in concentration that every now and then turn into paintings. This involves an unconsciously structured form of thinking, a way of analysing other elements the artist is attending to: photographs, installations, objects. Non-representational images repeatedly take on new forms and each image of this kind can be linked to others. According to Gabriel Orozco this is what abstraction can be used for: as a means to understand the way reality is perceived in a new era.