Director, Glenn Lowry: Much of Orozco’s work is inspired by the location where it’s made. Four Bicycles: There Is Always One Direction is a good example of that impulse. This sculpture was made in Rotterdam, a city where bike riding is an essential part of daily life.
Curator, Ann Temkin: He’s taking something which symbolizes movement, but he’s making them inert by putting them together in this, funny kind of acrobatic act. So you have something which is about motion, but is not in motion.
And what’s also really clear in the Four Bicycles is the importance of the circle as a motif in his, art. It’s obviously there in his name, with Orozco, three O’s kind of almost rotating like bicycle wheels through the writing of the name. But it’s there, in drawings. It’s there in paintings. It’s there in sculpture. It’s there in photographs. And one could say that it’s almost like a signature element that he finds in the world again and again, and then transforms into his art. You can make all sort of interpretive leaps about how it is the earth, or the cosmos, or the infinity of time but, whether you choose to take it at that level or you just choose to take it as the round and roundness of making form, or of passing time, or of getting from one place to another, because that indeed is what wheels let you do, it’s an essential component of Orozco’s work.