Gabriel Orozco was born in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, in 1962. He has been a key figure in contemporary art since the early 1990s.
He studied at the National School of Plastic Arts at UNAM (1981-1984) and later at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid (1986-1987). Between 1987 and 1991, he organized El Taller de los Viernes (Friday Workshop) at his home in Tlalpan, a collaborative learning space with younger artists Abraham Cruzvillegas, Gabriel Kuri, Damián Ortega, and Jerónimo López (also known as Dr. Lakra). In search of new models for artmaking, Orozco rejected the predominant painting movements of the time. However, he never entirely discarded the muralist tradition and reinterpreted it, integrating diverse techniques into his work and bringing it into public spaces to foster everyday interaction between art and viewer.
In the early 1990s, Orozco's artwork achieved international acclaim. His first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York featured, among other works, Home Run, an ephemeral intervention in which he invited neighbouring buildings residents to place oranges in the windows overlooking the museum's Sculpture Garden.
At the 1993 Venice Biennale, he presented an empty shoebox, a work that was a turning point in understanding contemporary art at the time. In 2006, for his first public commission, Mátrix Móvil suspended a recovered whale skeleton inside the Vasconcelos Library.
Years later, he collected remains washed up by the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Baja California for his Asterisms project at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. During the same period, he began a site-specific collaborative project, Las Ruinas del Circo, at the School of Arts in Havana, Cuba. In 2016, he created the South London Gallery's public garden. Recently, from 2019 to 2024, he led and coordinated the master plan for the integration and revitalization of Chapultepec Park in Mexico City.
