Gabriel Orozco

Marian Goodman Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent work by Gabriel Orozco. We are delighted and honored to simultaneously celebrate the artist’s 20th anniversary with the gallery. 

 

The exhibition continues Orozco’s investigation into intersections, mobility, rotation and dispersion. The new works maintain an elegant balance between geometry and the organic, the intentional and the accidental. 

 

In the North Gallery is a new installation titled Inner Cuts, 2014. The installation recombines boomerangs with the scraps of raw wood from which they were carved. The shapes float and hover in the space as if the act of throwing a boomerang has been caught in stages and suspended onto the walls, moving the viewer’s eye and body in a circle around the room. The open, airiness of the gallery is reminiscent of the open field in Bucks County, Pennsylvania where Orozco practices throwing his ever-expanding collection of boomerangs. When considered, the sport makes perfect sense within the terms of his work. A boomerang itself is a curved surface, and when successfully thrown the object cuts through the air in the shape of a broad circle. Orozco recently began designing his own boomerangs, experimenting with the creation of wooden prototypes. Inner Cuts focuses on the leftovers of this process, the shapes organically and accidentally formed from the negative space in the wood. 

 

In the North Viewing Room Orozco arranges various objects on display alongside a painting from his new Satellite series. The paintings are created using a slow technical process that employs a machine to spray oil onto the canvas.  The process has a blurring effect on the original image of the earth. In the center of the room is a vitrine containing an ashtray Orozco found at a flea market long ago. The ashtray is rounded and displays a map of the earth laid onto a grid pattern. The name of a former owner is etched into the side and the object displays the evidence and traces of many years of use. Within the ashtray Orozco placed a small commemorative replica of Sputnik, the first satellite ever to be launched successfully into space in 1957. The Soviet satellite ushered in many changes, and circled the earth for three months before falling from space.

 

On an adjacent wall Orozco has hung used shoe patterns gathered from a cobbler’s trash in Mexico. The templates are strung together on a rusted wire clothes hanger. The accumulation of normally discarded material in this piece reflects the wooden scraps of the boomerangs. Along another wall is a long, mostly empty shelf. In the center of the shelf lies the artist’s former cellphone case on which Orozco placed circular vinyl stickers. Orozco also applied these stickers to a number of his friends’ and colleagues’ phones. Placing stickers on the phones was an improvisational game that generated a connection - an exchange between the artist and the recipient. The phones then traveled to disparate locations and each bears individual effects of use over time. The empty portion of the shelf serves as a holding place for the undefined number of friends’ phones moving throughout the world. 

 

In the South Gallery are a number of new graphite drawings and three new paintings. The drawings are on wood panel, covered in linen, then plaster, and then graphite. In a number of the drawings Orozco used a metal tipped compass to etch into the graphite revealing the white plaster underneath. The effect of the sanding and chiaroscuro in others provides an illusion of depth and three-dimensionality. Some seem to have an organized chaos about them while others convey a tranquil quality. In a recent interview Orozco says “an object in motion, when it’s constantly colliding, when it’s involved in constant accidents, tends towards a circular form…The circle is not a platonic shape for me. For me the circle or the sphere is more what objects tend towards, when they are exposed to nature, collisions, and erosion.” 

 

The repeated sequence of circles in the three new paintings titled Inner Sections, (2014) likewise creates a surface of complex geometry. The overlapping of the circles, as they spin and move outwards from the center of the square, generates a proliferation of fragmented residue. Orozco fills the quartered and halved circles with color as well as the slivers – the leftovers created from the collisions. The evolution of movement from the center towards the open space echoes the circuit of the boomerang flying elliptically around the thrower. 

 

Gabriel Orozco was born in 1962 in Veracruz, Mexico. He lives and works internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include Fleurs fantômes, commissioned by the Centre Region at Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, Loire, France and on view through December 31, 2016; Gabriel Orozco: Natural Motion at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2013) which traveled to the Moderna Museet, Sweden (2014); Thinking in Circles, at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2013); and Asterisms, at the Deutsche Guggenheim and the Guggenheim, New York (2012). From 2009–2011 a retrospective of the artist’s work traveled from the Museum of Modern Art, New York to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland and the Tate Modern, London. Forthcoming in 2015 is a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan. 

Please join us for the opening reception on September 16th from 6-8pm.  

For further information please contact the gallery at: 212-977-7160.