Gabriel Orozco: Asterisms

Gabriel Orozco

Asterisms, the eighteenth project in the series of works commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim, is a two-part installation consisting of objects and photographs by Gabriel Orozco. For this work, the artist collected thousands of objects that had been thrown away at two locations: at a sports area near his apartment in New York and in Baja California Sur. There, on the coast of Mexico, mountains of industrial waste washed ashore from throughout the Pacific pile up in a protected biosphere. The exhibition Asterisms contrasts these two extensive installations, which oscillate provocatively between the macro and the micro level, with each other and, in doing so, takes up themes that are typical in Orozco’s work: poetic encounters with everyday materials, the presence of the traces of erosion and the ever present tension between nature and culture. The installations are accompanied by large-format photographs in which Orozco records the objects in the studio sorted by material, colour and size, or other characteristics. Another photo work shows the landscape from which the found objects originated, arranged by the same system, and apparently random objects created on site. Asterisms illustrates and intensifies Orozco’s subtle observation of the world within the framework of his unconventional system.