Gabriel Orozco

Gabriel Orozco’s latest exhibition at kurimanzutto presents recent drawings, paintings and sculptures intricately connected to the places where he lives.

The drawings in Diario de Plantas, made in notebooks small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, record the imprints and sketches of leaves to trace an open-ended cartography of organic growth. Orozco began this series in Tokyo during the COVID pandemic, documenting the leaves that caught his attention or fell at his feet; then, the diary traveled with him to Acapulco and Mexico City, where he was working on the master plan for a large public project to renovate the city’s central Chapultepec Park. From the pages of his Diario we get a glimpse of the artist’s daily practice as well as his enduring interest in landscape and the natural environment. The Diario seems to document a form of vegetal, photosynthetic language, a kind of plant-thinking that communicates with us from the botanical entanglements of each page. Taken together, they grow into their own form of breathing and writing, with and in nature.

The sculptures are carved in stone based on the rotational relationship between time and matter present in some of his previous works, going as far back as the 1990s.  Seeking to work with limestone, in 2017 he moved with his family to Bali, Indonesia, where this material has been used in temples for centuries. Here he began the Dés, dice in French, a series that furthers his investigation of circles, axles, seriality and symmetry. The sculptures included in the exhibition were made in Mexico, carved from local stones such as red volcanic tezontle and white marble.

In his most recent paintings, Orozco articulates the seemingly implausible encounter of two figures, both produced around the 15th century: Leonardo Da Vinci’s ink notebook drawing, Vitruvian Man, and the monumental stone sculpture of Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of life and death.