NYAB Event - Gabriel Orozco "Corplegados and Particles"

Gabriel Orozco "Corplegados and Particles"

Marian Goodman Gallery

This event has ended.

Two new bodies of work will be introduced in this exhibition. In chronological order, the first, titled Corplegados, is a series of large format drawings realized over the course of the last four years as a private, intimate activity amidst busy preparation for his retrospective. The Corplegados, or literally ‘folded-bodies’, are all purposefully life-size. Orozco folded the paper four times in halves to become portable documents which accompanied him on his many travels. Orozco would work with the paper sometimes hung, sometimes flat on the floor, or sometimes folded on his desk in sections like pages of a book. Over time, the paper amassed numerous layers of ink and gouache, as well as writing and sometimes pasted photographs. Orozco has referred to the Corplegados as a kind of “expanded notebook” and they share the same components with his known notebooks in that both serve as a companion to the artist over long periods of time and relate directly to the environments in which they are created. Similar to earlier works like Havre-Caumartin (1999), the Corplegados are the manifestation of imprints of the body while interacting in specific situations. The relationship to his surroundings is an important element in all of Orozco’s work and the shift from natural to urban habitats is visually evident in the series as each drawing transitions from bright, colorful, painterly gestures to linear, geometric shapes and a more muted palette. These alterations reflect the different psychological and/or environmental changes to which the artist and his drawings have been exposed to over long periods of time.

Orozco began the Particle Paintings almost a year ago in November, 2010. They continue his ongoing geometric research of the past twenty years using circular shapes inserted with rectilinear axels to explore behaviors of form and construction. The images used in the paintings are photographic reproductions of Orozco’s own photographs, found postcards, news images from the internet, as well as some of his favorite paintings from art history. Orozco utilizes the digital tools of vector and raster computer graphics to deconstruct, divide, and open up the images in circles of varying color, creating a data structure based on a grid but divided in dots. These dots are adjacent to each other and their order is rectilinear, not diagonal or spiral as is usual in offset photo reproduction. This resulting structure functions as a platform to execute Orozco’s interventions with new dots of color that are manually applied on top and/or juxtaposed in new grids over the digitally constructed structure. This process becomes a sort of particle game as the artist uses strategies of extraction and insertion to manipulate and develop a new topographical space.