Postminimalist Artist Takes Pictures of Pollution In Ecuador, Gets Mad Press

The latest Men’s Vogue features an exhaustive, 6-page profile on unorthodox Mexican sculptor Gabriel Orozco to highlight an expedition he took through the dense Ecuadorian wilderness last spring. Although some would like to think he was out there on a quest for inspiration, Orozco was probably just looking for some crazy shit to add to his wacky artistic resumé:

In 1993, for his first New York show, he set oranges on apartment windowsills across from the MoMA sculpture garden. [...] Over the past 13 years at New York’s Marian Goodman Gallery, Orozco…has presented artworks made out of yogurt container lids, lint from a dryer, and sand. He built a custom four-way ping-pong table with a lily pond in the middle—his Ping-Pond Table. He invaded a supermarket and arranged cat-food tins on watermelons. Last year, just before a major mid-career retrospective at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, Orozco took a trip along the beaches of Baja California and unearthed a whale skeleton that he covered end to end with bold patterns in pencil.

With such a gimmicky distinct repertoire to speak of, where do you go from there? Oh, yeah–trying not to poison gallery-goers with stuff you bring back from a Latin American jungle.

Art of Darkness [Men's Vogue]
Image [Gabriel Orozco / Men's Vogue]