Prospect recommends: Gabriel Orozco

Deep winter is a bad time for grand openings, but New York, bracing and beautiful at new year, has come up trumps. Gabriel Orozco is a genius who transforms whatever he happens upon—a Citroën car, a ball of Plasticine, an entire whale skeleton, a billiard table, his own unmatched socks—into something surprising. The Museum of Modern Art gave this Mexican artist his first solo museum show in 1993.

Now it is offering a mid-career retrospective, which promises to be an international phenomenon of 2010: travelling on to Basel (18th April-10th August), Paris (15th September-3rd January 2011), and reaching Tate Modern on 19th January 2011.

Just as he refuses to live in any one place, lodging alternately in Mexico City, New York and Paris, so Orozco evades all categories. His quizzical scrutiny of an idea or object may issue in a drawing, a photograph, a sculpture, an installation, or a painting—but always as something provocative, playful and, if you care to dwell on it, profound. Geometry, maps and games—systems in general—fascinate him, as do the random spontaneity and free flow of chance that defy them. Visitors to his Serpentine show in 2004 will remember the skull covered in a graphite chequerboard of black and white squares, named Black Kites. This and other key pieces of the last 20 years will be on show.

Moma New York, 13th December-1st March, www.moma.org