ART CITIES:London-Gabriel Orozco

In his new exhibition Gabriel Orozco, presents 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.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Marian Goodman Gallery Archive

In 2015, the artist 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. 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. Orozco appropriates materials that had an original and specific functionality, objects that have their own set of rules and criteria which he deconstructs, reassembling them according to his own process and decisions.

Info: Marian Goodman Gallery, 5-8 Lower John Str., London, Duration: 13/6-7/8/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 10:00-18:00, www.mariangoodman.com