Gabriel Orozco: Partituras

Marian Goodman Gallery is very pleased to announce Gabriel Orozco: Partituras, on view in New York from 12 September – 25 October 2025. For this exhibition, Orozco will present a new series of work which takes its starting point in music. Having played the piano improvisationally for many years, Orozco compares this practice to drawing in time and space, using sound and acoustics. The Partituras paintings explore the translation of these musical sketches into his distinctive geometric language, creating works that resonate with shifting rhythms and tempos.

In her text on the new series, the art historian Briony Fer writes: “if Orozco’s unlikely course in this new body of work explores a relationship to music, it is, of course, not in search of the spiritual in art. Instead, he turns this mythic origin on its head to break the musical score down into its most basic material units; instead of striving for the vibration of the soul, he explores the vibrations within a particular situation. Orozco treats the musical score as an interface between the act of playing the piano and the act of making a painting. They are not inspired by the music of a particular composer like, say, Brancusi making a sculpture in response to a piece by Erik Satie. In this case, the relationship between painting and music is absolutely not the  ‘theme’ of the work, but simply provides a procedure – and a space to work in and through a set of rules that he sets himself.”

Elaborating on the process Orozco uses to create the Partituras, Fer writes that it “is a series of translations, that take place over an extended period of time. It’s a variation on the way Orozco made the Samurai Tree paintings based on the rotation of the knight’s move in chess. But now there are several stages involved: from playing, to recording, to listening, to transcribing, to drawing, to transferring, to painting. These allow for multiple spatial and temporal  transpositions. It’s important that the titles consist only of the date and the time he played the piece on the piano, although evidently the painting we are seeing has undergone several phases to become the precision diagram that it is. The process is circuitous – but as Orozco has said, it’s possible a musician could actually ‘read’ the Partituras paintings and make musical sense of them. There are certainly aspects of encoding and recoding that happen as he turns the score into his own system of geometry. In the process, one could say that the artist creates his own semiotic system, translating each individual note into a corresponding sign. After all the mediations involved in the process of making them, perhaps the paintings can be seen as ‘time-pieces’ of an unconventional kind, where the medium of time itself is at stake.”

Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962) divides his time between Mexico City, Paris, Tokyo, and New York. A major retrospective of his work traveled from 2009 to 2011, starting at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and moving on to the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland, the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Tate Modern, London. His most recent exhibition was held at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City (2025). In 2025 Orozco received the Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Over the last decade, Orozco has developed a number of permanent landscape design projects for museums and public spaces which include the South London Gallery garden (2013-2016), Chapultepec Park in Mexico City (2019-2025), and the Leeum Museum garden in Seoul (2022-2025). Latest publications on Orozco’s work include Politécnico Nacional, with texts by Briony Fer and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, (Rizzoli, 2025), Working Tables / Spacetime, text by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (Marian Goodman Gallery, 2024), and Diario de Plantas (Zolo Press, 2023).

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