Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962)

Orozco is an artist known as both experimental creator and documentor of the banal aspects of the world. His practice is one that suggests fractions of things in connectivity, a stringing together of thoughts, a constant composition in the making that can turn the most commonplace object of our everyday environment into an obscure work of art, and vice versa.
In 1995, the artist filled his socks with wet papier mâché, and shortly therafter, peeled the cloth off the filling, once the viscous sludge inside had fully dried. The resulting objects bear the imprint of the textured fabric of the socks, but barely resembel the latter. Orozco metamorphoses the object into something new, something abstract, in a process as if he were peeling the skin of a fruit. The absurdity and simultaneous tranquility of the objects result from their creation of a new space, a new world: what we see is not the negative space inside a sock, which we would be used to, nor do we see a cast of a sock.

Orozco has a natural touch for materials, no matter what their origin. The latter has gifted him with the ability to make the world come alive in boty hands and the eye. He has the ability to notice things, to transform them, and to reintroduce them as something new.