Gabriel Orozco Shows at White Cube

Sunday, 01 October 2006 18:29

London, UK - White Cube presents the work of Gabriel Orozco in his first exhibition with the gallery.  To launch White Cube’s new space at Mason’s Yard, Orozco has developed his ongoing exploration of the readymade, mapping and geometry into a monumental new sculpture.

For his seminal work Black Kites (1997), Orozco painstakingly drew a grid-like composition in graphite over the entire surface of a human skull, a vivid enactment of his phrase, “volume made graphic, object made image”.  For his White Cube, Mason’s Yard exhibition, Orozco expands the graphic and conceptual vocabulary that he explored in this work to create Dark Wave, a breathtaking sculpture that tests the interplay between object and space, image and form.  Orozco has mapped a geometric pattern, drawn in graphite, onto the skeleton of a 14-meter Rorqual whale.  Taking a number of pivotal points across the skeleton, concentric circles have been inscribed on the surface, overlapping in areas to form intricate geometric patterns, which, for Orozco, describe “the topography of the object”.

On the ground floor, a new group of paintings are presented.  Part of the ongoing The Samurai Tree series which was first launched at the Venice Biennale in 2005, the paintings examine the range of permutations possible within a (self-)defined spatial and color system based on the ‘Knight’s move’ within a game of chess.  In each, a circle is drawn in the centre, and moving out from this point, a sequence of increased or decreased circles is drawn, until they reach the limits of the square.  Using a traditional method of gold leaf and tempera applied to cedar wood, the new paintings also reference the formal techniques used to make medieval icons.