SIXTEEN years ago the Museum of Modern Art granted a little-known Mexican artist his first solo show in the US. Then 31, peripatetic and studio-less, the artist, Gabriel Orozco, who belonged to a new generation rebelling against the expensive manufactur­ed art objects of the 1980s, endeavored to produce as fresh and serendipitous a museum exhibition as possible.

Rejecting the pristine ga­llery used by MoMA’s Project Series for emerging artists, Orozco chose instead the museum’s nooks and crannies: a space between escalators for a scroll of phone numbers, a corner of the sc­ulpture garden for a hammock between trees. What many remember best about that small show was a whimsical piece not even in the mu­seum itself: “Home Run,” an arrangement of fr­esh oranges in the apartment and office windows across 54th Street.

Orozco’s return to the museum, for a 20-year survey of his work that opens on Sunday, is quite different. It is as concrete as the first show was ephemeral, as pl­anned as it was improvised and as splashy as it was qui­et, with a mammoth, elaborately produced art object at its centre: “Mobile Matrix,” a whale skeleton excavated from the sands of Baja California, fitted onto a metal armature and intricately inscribed with graphite rings and circles by a team of 20 members who exhausted 6,000 mechanical pencil leads.

At 47, Orozco is no longer the footloose wan­derer, to­othbrush, notebook and ca­m­era in hand, who found poetry in puddles and dignity in debris, dung and dryer lint. Still experimenting with new materials — cactuses, most recently — and varying modes of expression, he is nonetheless far more rooted, some say far more conventional, than the young artist crashing at his girlfriend’s New York University dorm room during his first MoMA show.

Now Orozco is a husba­nd, father and international art star, with homes in Mexico, Paris and New York (an $8.8 million West Village town house next door to the model Gisele Bündchen’s). Having been cro­wned “the leading conceptual and installation artist of his generation” by The New Yorker in 2001, who has more than three dozen works in the collections of MoMA, the Gu­ggenheim and the Whitney, Orozco is at home too in the heart of the Manhattan art estab­lishment. Although so­me believe that success has eroded his idealism, he se­ems quite comfortable with the monumentalisation th­at a midcareer retrospective at MoMA implies.

“I was never an idealist,” he said in an interview at the museum. “I was not against the market. I was trying to un­derstand the market. I was not against the object. I was trying to understand why we make objects. I was not even ag­ainst painting itself when I stopped doing it. I was against the way that people were painting because I thought it was very boring.”

In regard to the retrospective he said: “It’s very important to look back, like a scientist who studies his experiments and sees what worked and what didn’t. And then, of course, it’s important to forget. And I am very good at that, forgetting.”

During the installation of his exhibition in the kind of white-walled MoMA gallery that that he once spurned, Orozco, tousle haired and rumpled, received a visit from the museum’s immaculately groomed director, Glenn D Lowry, whose red silk tie matched his pocket square. “Hola!” Lowry said, sweeping into the nearly empty gallery, where just a few pieces had been uncrated. “Exciting, exciting.”

Lowry made a beeline for “La DS,” a well-polished silver Citroën sliced lengthwise and reassembled without the middle third. It is Orozco’s signature wo­rk, a totemic French car remade in a Peugeot garage on the outskirts of Paris in 1993.

“The best, the best,” Lowry said. “This is like one of my favorite works of art. It also looks so clean.”