Gabriel Orozco and New Mexican Art

In the twenty-first century, Mexico has seen some dramatic changes with the end of PRI-style government, organized crime, and economic crises. But it's still a modern country and it reflects in its art--particularly in the art of Gabriel Orozco.

Born in 1967, Orozco was the son of Mario Orozco Rivera, an art professor and muralist who collaborated with the famous artist David Alfaro Siqueiros. Growing up under his father's influence, Orozco spent the 1980s studying at schools like the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas in Mexico City and the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. When he returned to Mexico City in 1987, he began meeting with other artists like Gabriel Kuri and Abraham Cruzvillegas, developing a distinct non-traditional style of painting and sculpture. Orozco's nomadic lifestyle led to collect throwaway objects and incorporate them into his art, which he uses to build on his method of engaging the audience through materials found in everyday life.

It can be difficult to pin down the style of Gabriel Orozco since he's given to experimenting with different forms, whether it's the use of iconic skulls from Mexican folklore, urban photography, debris collected off the side of the road, or fractal geometric patterns in vivid colors. But his catalog of work has a central theme and that is to disrupt the common notions held by his audience. His works challenge them to think differently about the relationships between space, time, and color.

In 2004, Orozco entered a period of abstract painting, which best be seen in a series of paintings entitled Samurai Tree. Using computer software, he began with a single point, around which he created a circle, which he then broke up into quadrants and repeated the process in a fractal or constantly repeating style. From there he painted different section in red, blue, white, and gold, adding texture and a subtle motion to an otherwise static layout.

While the tree of the painting is obvious, the term "samurai" actually comes from chess. Orozco used the Samurai Opening (also known as the Desprez Opening) as its starting point, turning an irrelevant pawn move into an elaborate scheme highlighted by color. Each painting in the set represents hundreds of possible moves that can be played with the pawn from the Samurai Opening. Orozco has said that he believes the circle to be a "very useful instrument in terms of motion" and wanted to use circles and geometry to convey a sense of motion and growth from a flat two-dimensional painting. In this way, Orozco continues to challenge his audience with simple but effective artwork.

To see more work by Gabriel Orozco, you can visit the Galeria Kurimanzutto in Mexico City, the Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris, and the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York.

Image by Andrew Russeth on Flickr

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