[March 12 2024]
Bringing together sculptural works, paintings, and drawings, Gabriel Orozco’s latest eponymously titled exhibition is a multimedia register of the artist’s expansive practice and ongoing inquiries into materiality and geometric forms. Orozco began his series of drawings Diario de Plantas while living in Tokyo during the pandemic, documenting leaves that caught his attention. The visual diary eventually followed him to Acapulco and Mexico City, and now comprises a collection of 724 drawings and imprints in gouache, tempera, ink, and graphite. Otherwise ubiquitous, even commonplace, here the leaves become a tangible link to the ephemeral – the passing of the seasons, of places inhabited.
A new series of sculptures, titled Dés (or dice in French), was inspired by Orozco’s time in Bali, where he spent two years working with limestone alongside local master carvers. For this series, Orozco worked with blocks of white marble and tezontle, a red volcanic stone indigenous to Mexico, carving concentric circles onto each of the six sides. What emerged are playful abstractions, vaguely reminiscent of deconstructed three-dimensional glyphs. A series of more recent paintings juxtapose Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man with la Coatlicue, the Aztec mother goddess who represents both the fertile earth and the death that consumes all the living.
On view until April 27th, 2024.
Kurimanzutto
Gobernador Rafael Rebollar 94
San Miguel Chapultepec
Ciudad de México
Text by Anfisa Vrubel
Images by Gerardo Landa and Eduardo Lópex
© Purple Institute