Obituaries

Summary: "The beginnings of the Obits series date back to 1994, when Orozco started to occasionally cut out obituary headlines from The New York Times and insert them into his notebooks... In 2006 he decided to create a project based on this kind of sentence. For several months he went through current and past issues of The New York Times and collected the headlines of boituaries for people from all fields of society. He arranged the sentences printed on large sheets of Japanese paper (each 211 x 111 cm) making a total if 27 pieces with 27 sentences on each paper, which were hung on all four walls of the north room at Marian Goodman Gallery... Each headline, so to say, contains a compressed microcosm of a whole life. Orozco cuts out the descriptive phrase of the headline and erases the name as well as the age. On the one had this shows at first sight the difference between his work and an archival approach, wihich would probably classify the phrases in chronlogical or alphabetical lists. The Obits instead have a "floating" typography, where neither the succession on the page nor the font size (reproduced in relative scale as they appeared in the original newspaper format) constitutes any kind of hierarchy between the phrases." --Hans-Ulrich Obrist.