Gabriel Orozco Photogravity

Hardcover
184 pages, 7 ½ x 11 in/
30 color + 90 b/w illus.
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000
ISBN 9780876331286

In 1993 Gabriel Orozco removed a lengthwise section of a Citroën DS and reconnected the two sides, making the car’s fleet form look lighter yet. Orozco continues his experimentations with perceptions of gravity and weight in Photogravity, his latest installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Here photographs of pre-Columbian sculptures from the museum’s Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, mounted and backed by stands, share gallery space with photographs of Orozco’s own pieces. Orozco homogenizes and juxtaposes photography and sculpture—each endowed with properties of the other—and in doing so creates unexpected visual relationships and invites dialogue between the two mediums.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition in Philadelphia, this book also presents the visually unexpected, creating a colorful combination of writings and collages from the artist’s notebooks, his photographs and sculptures, and the Arensbergs’ pre-Columbian works.

Ann Temkin is the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. David Sylvester is a contemporary art critic and curator.