Gabriel Orozco

Gabriel Orozco
October 6 - November 12, 2005
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 6, 6-8 pm

Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition of new work by Gabriel Orozco. The show will open on Thursday, October 6th and run through Saturday, November 12th.

The exhibition will feature a range of recent and past works which highlight the diversity of Orozco's practice and emphasize the conceptual relationship between his various approaches and media. On view will be a selection of recent paintings, video, drawings and photographs, as well as a tabletop of sculpture comprised of working objects produced over the span of six years, from 2000 through 2005.

Well known for his sculpture, drawing, photography, and video works which have often resulted from a process of random encounters and contingencies as well as spontaneous actions and interventions, over the past two years Orozco has extended his investigations to include painting.This exhibition will be the first presentation in New York of the new paintings, which have heretofore been seen only in Europe, most recently in The Experience of Art at the 51st Venice Biennale this summer, and last year as part of Gabriel Orozco, a solo show at the Serpentine Gallery, London.

On view in the North Gallery will be several works from a recent series titled Samourai Tree.In the new paintings Orozco continues his research into the phenomenology of structures, using the canvas as a vehicle and abstraction as an instrument of perception or tool of comprehension, akin to a tantric model. The Samourai Tree works explore the spatial representation of matter and organic processes within a lexicon of systems and games, demonstrating chance operations and Orozco's own empirical strategies within a framework of abstraction and geometric fields. As Benjamin Buchloh writes, "Gabriel Orozco's recent hermetic painterly explorations in the Italian pavilion... seemingly probe whether a fusion of the legacies of Mondrian and John Cage would be viable today ." 

This series of works on canvas represents a new direction within the artist's own practice and invites correspondences with earlier bodies of work. 

Orozco elaborates:
" The circle for me is a very useful Instrument in terms of movement, in relation to gravity and erosion. It's the tendency of objects when they're in movement and are eroded by friction... I decided to do [the paintings] to see how much they could express geometry but also organicity... I decided to start from the centre of the plane, which I think is not very common. I started from the minimal point of the centre, and then developed the structure towards the frame as the limit. ... The sequence of colors is distributed based on how the chess knight moves, 'jumping' two blocks and one, which I take as a representation of tri-dimensionality in a bi-dimensional field... I believe this system represents the rotation of the body, in its growing or shrinking and in moving and rotating. ... Even though I was curious to explore the possibilities of abstraction, I don't quite think in terms of abstraction in art. I think in terms of fields connected through this structure, making this a geometric field in which, when you look at it, you become aware of something that is obviously very abstract . But it's also something that sounds as if it is, or can be logical in relation to an organism,or in relation to how things grow or happen, in relation to abstract thinking itself, in relation to instruments, in relation to mechanicity, in relation to our body" (Gabriel Orozco in conversation with Benjamin Buchloh, July 2004, Goethe Institute, London; published in The Experience of Art: 51 st International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, 2005).

A related video work, 677 Variants, ( 2005, 11 min. color) created by computer-generated animation and shown on a flat screen, will be on view in an adjacent gallery. Based on the formal vocabulary of geometric patterns and colors used in the diagrams for the paintings, 677 Variants articulates the motion of spheres, cells, atoms, voids, and ellipses intrinsic to Orozco's iconography, from the airline ticket drawings to the Atomists series, meditating on an entire morphology of representation.

A significant feature, and a culminating point of the exhibition, will include the display of a group of objects gathered over the course of six years, from 2000 to 2005, which will be presented on a tabletop in the South Gallery.Including a multitude of forms, the objects contain narratives of process and intervention within each surface and are made up of a cast of items--from kneaded terracotta to polyurethane 'spume', from 'detourned' vessels and found containers to molded plaster forms; from fabricated circles and cut-outs to refilled voids. This catalogue of indexical sculpture assembles an array of experimental models, laboratory 'remains', emblematic ephemera, readymade materials, and working objects, and represents the juncture between an aesthetic of spontaneous gesture, analytical accident, everyday accumulation, and handcrafted objects at the root of Orozco's practice.

Important one-man surveys of Gabriel Orozco's work have recently been seen in exhibitions at the Palacio Cristal, Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid in 2005; the Serpentine Gallery, London in July-August 2004; and The Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C, which presented a survey of the photographic works in the summer of 2004; as well as the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland in 2003.In 2000-2001 a solo exhibition opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and traveled to the Museo Internacional Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Monterrey, Mexico.

His work has been included in group exhibitions such as Monument to Now at the Deste Foundation, Athens (2004-05); Do You Believe in Reality , Taipei Biennial, Taipei, Taiwan (2004-05); Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourist's Eye , Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2005); and Work Ethic , Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2004-05).Orozco's work is currently on view through early November in The Experience of Art at the 51st Venice Biennale, Venice and at the Inaugural exhibition of the Museo Experimental el Eco, in Mexico City. It will soon be seen in an upcoming group exhibition Part Object, Part Sculpture, curated by Helen Molesworth at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio in late October 2005.

Please join us at the opening reception on Thursday, October 6th from 6 - 8 p.m