Gabriel Orozco, right, in an interview during MoMA's press preview

The press preview for the 47-year-old artist’s MoMA retrospective last week was crowded with the usual NY art reporters, plus a healthy contingent of Mexican journalists wielding video cameras and tape recorders, eager to capture a personal word.

The exhibit contains Orozco’s best-known objects, including a spliced Citroen, a checkerboard skull and an empty shoebox.

Some bewitch and others are more appealing in concept than face-to-face. My favorite was the back room, containing a table laid out with organic clay forms, like a souk where the artist shops for ideas.

The back room also contains a shelf of objects wrought from clay and wire and bits of plastic, displayed near related drawings–another of the show’s successful passages.

Orozco's "Mobile Matrix" viewed from above

Heroic in scale, but lacking in consequence is the 2006 “Mobile Matrix,”  a whale skeleton covered in pencil-drawn stripes, dangled in the museum’s atrium.  To me, the most alluring aspect was the shadows projected onto the floor.

Detail "Samurai Tree Invariants" 2006

Gallery installed with digital prints, "Samurai Tree Invariants" 2006

"My Hands Are My Heart" 1991

"Yogurt Caps" 1994, one of four