Lotus Leaf
His use of everyday objects in his installations brings an unsettling and thought-provoking sense of the uncanny to his work.
Gabriel Orozco
Mexico City, 1962
Lives and works in Mexico City
Gabriel Orozco is a mixed-media artist who, through sculpture, painting, photography and video, explores space, time and philosophy in a poetic and metaphorical way. His use of everyday objects in his installations brings an unsettling and thought-provoking sense of the uncanny to his work, a skill that has earned him the accolade of one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century.
Orozco’s Lotus Leaf series (2004) is a thought-provoking and melancholy addition to the Collection. The series comprises six editions of soft ground etchings on gampi, mounted between UV resistant plexiglass in a wooden frame. There is something distinctly biological about the series, in the visible veins in the symmetrical curves of the leaf but also in the distinct connotations of human lungs. This pulmonary similarity is foiled by a rather poetic juxtaposition between the natural and the contrived. Orozco’s lotus leaves are actually etchings on printing places; the final effect is a manmade rendering of the natural condition of a dried leaf. Every seam, fracture and insect bite has been distilled into custom-milled Gampi paper. The way the paper is displayed contributes invariably to Orozco’s vision for the series. It is suspended between the glass like a delicate specimen in a laboratory, removed from nature and removed in turn from its original form through precise etching.