Black Skate Kite

This collaboration elaborates on an image of one of Gabriel Orozco’s most iconic works — Black Kites (1997) — which was originally conceived for Documenta X shortly after one of Orozco’s lungs collapsed in 1996. The experience of spending a week in the hospital inspired him to create something via “a very slow process.” Over the next few months he covered an entire human skull in a checkerboard grid made of graphite. The work embodies ideas of the memento mori and brings to mind questions of our human fate and mortality.