Gabriel Orozco

Marian Goodman, 5-8 Lower John Street, London,
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Event has ended
This event ended on Friday 7th of August 2015
Admission
Free
Location

Marian Goodman, 5-8 Lower John Street, London,

Nearest Tube/Rail Stations
Piccadilly Circus 0.16 miles

Marian Goodman is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Gabriel Orozco at the London gallery, his first in the city since the 2011 retrospective at Tate Modern. He will present new paintings, scrolls, sculptures, drawings and photographs made over the last year in Japan and Mexico.

The itinerant nature of Gabriel Orozco’s practice has been a defining characteristic of his career, providing him with inspiration through travel and immersion in foreign cultures. In 2015 he took up residence in Japan where the majority of this exhibition was created, including a series of 28 collages on traditional scrolls.
The scrolls are displayed both on the gallery walls and in their own individual wooden presentation boxes. While the compositions are characteristic of Orozco’s complex formal experiments with interlocking circles, here they are constructed from appropriated swatches of traditional Japanese silks.

The circular motifs explored in these scrolls have been the subject of Orozco’s paintings since his first Samurai paintings made a decade ago. In his most recent paintings here, a mechanized spirographic repetition of a circular grid populates the canvas. Orozco chose which intersections of these circles to paint or gild, and which to be left blank, creating a plane of dispersed and deconstructing circles with captured interlocking sections. Briony Fer suggests that Orozco´s circular drawings and paintings exemplify ‘the twin action in his work, a ruination of center and an infinite dispersal of its elements.’ (Briony Fer, Spirograph: The Circular Ruins of Drawing, 2004)

Experimenting with and altering found objects, Orozco crosses fluidly and fluently between varying modes of production. Something else that grew from his time spent in Japan are a series of wooden totemic sculptures made from drawing, painting and collaging found local materials. Made of components that are ubiquitously Japanese, comprised of the packaging material and other detritus of urban Tokyo, they are placed leaning against the walls and columns of the gallery space at varying intervals and heights.

Finding inspiration in the urban environment and domestic objects as well as the human body and nature, Orozco makes visible the poetry of serendipity. For him, photography has been a constant mediator of his nomadic lifestyle. His photographs balance the diaristic tone of an artist’s notebook with an intense study of the world around him. Working with his iPhone allows Orozco the freedom to capture the beauty of a fleeting moment, chance encounter or spontaneous intervention into the landscape.

Untitled, 2015
Tempera and burnished gold leaf on linen canvas
90 x 90 cm. (35.43 x 35.43 in.)

Tags: Art

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