Gabriel Orozco at MOMA in New York

I happened to be in New York last week in the middle of the big storm. Wet and grumpy from tromping through world-class slush, I thought to console myself with the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Beloved Cézannes and Matisses were indeed a boost, but the fun really started when I wandered up to the sixth floor to see what was going on in the temporary galleries. Gabriel Orozco, a Mexican conceptual artist (born 1962) was what was going on.

It didn't start well. If the plain white cardboard shoebox sitting on the floor was the artist's introduction, I wasn't sure I needed to get better acquainted. The next room: yogurt tops. Dated and pinned to the wall.

I don't know why I didn't leave. Probably the disincentive of the weather.

But you must be patient with conceptual art. Sometimes the idea (the conception, in case you didn't make that connection) is smaller than the sum of the parts, and you may still hate it on the way out, but why not give it a chance? If nothing else, you may, like the German mother and daughter examining the long wall display of small strange objects, have the best laugh of your life.

It means nothing, except…

A pair of shoes, sculptures of squeezed clay, nesting plaster bowls— it all means nothing. Except it does: The clay squeezed by hands becomes a heart, the nesting plaster bowls evoke a solar system.

Look close. Give it a chance.

By the time the mother and daughter passed me, I was starting to get it. A quote from the artist helped: Orozco calls himself "a consumer of anything and a producer of what already exists."

OK, that's kind of interesting in a "'been there, done that' sort of way. Duchamp got there first. But you can say that about most art. So Shakespeare wrote the definitive play about love; does that mean no one else should ever try?

I kept my curiosity on high alert as I proceeded through the galleries and began to see some links. Orozco makes a point of having no fixed studio; he wanders the world finding spaces as well as objects and materials. His fascination with materials borrows equally from the man-made and the natural. He is a craftsman who likes puzzles, both the creating and the figuring out.

Pleasing to men

The show's most popular item, surrounded by an admiring, even awestruck crowd, was a sculpture titled La DS 1993. A hint: many in the crowd were men. No, not a naked woman. A car, a vintage Citroen, sliced up and reassembled into a slimmed-down version, a play on the famously streamlined intention of the original.

Nearby, Four Bicycles (There is Always One Direction) presented another intriguing puzzle of craft and conception.

My favorite part, though, came in the final room, where a huge table was spread with a sumptuous feast of Orozco's materials: strips of tree bark, poured polymer, maple wings, plaster, clay, reeds, etc. The endless possibilities made an immediate and visible connection to the method and mind of this playful, imaginative sculptor/artist.

On the way downstairs I stopped at the display of objects and materials from Joseph Beuys, and found it a fitting coda. With his similar wide interest in natural and man-made objects, Orozco seems like the next runner in a relay of exploration and curiosity, where differences are a matter of technology and historical place, rather than of conceptual sympathies.