Gabriel Orozco — Marian Goodman Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 8 → October 20, 2012

The Galerie Marian Goodman is pleased to announce a new exhibition of works by Gabriel Orozco conjointly with Galerie Chantal Crousel.

On the ground floor of 79 rue du Temple, Gabriel Orozco will present for the first time in
Paris a sculpture he originally made for the 51stVenice Biennial in 2003 called Shade Between Rings of Air.

In Venice it was placed next to the patio of the Italian Pavilion where stood the original concrete structure, named La Pensilina.

La Pensilina, constructed by Carlo Scarpa in 1952, was conceived as a pergola within the inner patio of the Italian Pavilion,designed to house sculptures, plants and a fountain. In 2003 Orozco made this 1 to 1 replica in wood as a full scale model to be shown in an adjacent and quiet interior space of the Pavilion as a contrast to the original outside, already deteriorated by time and weather.

After the original exhibition in Venice, Orozco’s Shade Between Rings of Air started to travel on its own and has been exhibited in various places, generating a geographical distance but nevertheless drawing parallels in time to the static pergola of 1952. As a platonic replica, this model structure became an independent mobile architectural object to be inserted into different contexts.

As in some of Gabriel Orozco’s former works (La DS (1993), Elevator (1993), Observatory House (2006)), this sculptural process plays with specificity and cultural memory, as well as with the intersection between the individual and historical matter.

Exhibited before at the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid and at the Fine Arts Palace in Mexico City, Shade Between Rings of Air comes to France along with new terracotta sculptures.

The selection of terracottas made recently is part of the series Orthocenters. They are formed on a table by the impressions and rotations of the hand on a mass of clay. By constantly rotating on its own center, the clay forms a geometric shape(frequently triangular).After the initial shape is formed, the whole weight of the clay is laid to rest on a solid sphere. The shaped clay is then turned over and the sphere removed. The void left by the sphere recalls an empty pot.

In the downstairs gallery, we are presenting Solvitur Boomerando, a video of the artist throwing a boomerang, one of his favorite activities over the last few years. Orozco considers this occupation as an extension of his artistic practice. The act of throwing and catching boomerangs brings the thrower an increased awareness of nature and chance, as well as the continual surprise that something thrown away in the wind can come back to you.

The house in the video, known as the Observatory, was designed by the artist as an approximate replica of an architecturalinstrument from the 18th century Jantar Mantar site in New Delhi (India). The artist made this house located on the Pacific coast in Mexico, directly connected to nature and the landscape, as a platform of exploration with a 360° panoramic view.

The show also includes two grids of 99 photographs which document sculptural actions in two different architectural contexts: The Observatory House as well as the ruins of the school of Visual Arts in La Habana (Cuba).

Gabriel Orozco was born in the region of Veracruz in Mexico in 1962. International artist, Orozco lives between Mexico, the United States and France. His work has been exhibited in the most prestigious museums around the world. In 2010 and 2011, the MoMA in New York, Tate Modern in London and Centre Pompidou in Paris organized a retrospective of his work.Currently the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin is showing some of his new works.