Beschreibung:

SOLD TO BENEFIT FUNDACIÓN OLGA Y RUFINO TAMAYO Gabriel Orozco Secuencia de tréboles (Clover Sequence) 2005 acrylic on canvas 47 1/4 x 47 1/4 in. (120 x 120 cm.) This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.
Provenance Collection of the Artist Kurimanzutto, Mexico City Acquired from the above by the present owner Catalogue Essay “Sudden illumination is possible, but you have to know how to pay attention to it and separate it from everything else, because it passes by in an instant. Some works require it, others don’t… but an artist has to find his or her own scale. A special effect isn’t all that matters. The littlest things in life can be charged with meaning.” Gabriel Orozco The grand scope of Gabriel Orozco’s oeuvre has established him as one of the world’s leading interpreters of reality. His immensely varied body of work seeks to reassess and ultimately reform our consciousness of what is present in the human universe. With a sense of inquisitive playfulness, Orozco reshapes and resizes the visual iconography of our everyday lives, seeking to radicalize our physical experience of it. Employing a wide array of media—from found objects to photography, clay and canvas—Orozco always draws attention to the material inhabitants of our world, shedding new light on the relationship between our physical and intellectual engagements with reality. The son of a mural painter and art professor, Gabriel Orozco grew up overhearing scholarly conversations on art and its varied manifestations. After receiving a conventional artistic education in Mexico in the mid-eighties, Orozco relocated to Madrid for one year, where he developed an affinity for the non-traditional formats and materials of leading post-war artists. Never confined to any specific school of academic thought, his experimentation with a wide range of media soon became characteristic of his work, which involves painting, photography, sculpture, and readymades. The present lot, Secuencia de tréboles (Sequence of Clovers) has its conceptual origins in Orozco’s fascination with the complexities of nature and our tangible reality. The geometric form of the circle is commonly associated with the natural world, referencing the cycle of life as well as the atomic particles that makeup our bodies and surroundings. The circle comes up constantly in Orozco’s oeuvre, signifying his passion for the study of organic motifs and the creative potential of human consciousness. The concept harkens back to Orozco’s seminal work Horses Running Endlessly (1995), in which the artist created an oversized chessboard with 256 squares. The only pieces in Orozco’s version of chess are knights. The knight is a distinctive piece within the game, since it can move both vertically and horizontally in a single turn, with the unique power to create circular patterns on the checkered board. These circular movements are not represented graphically on the board, yet they can be clearly inferred from the rules of the game. In Horses Running Endlessly, Orozco’s knights are not directed anywhere—they are wandering aimlessly within the board in a spherical dance, challenging scientific theories of infinity and embodying Orozco’s interest in how spatial possibilities are generated. Orozco’s subsequent Samurai Tree series of paintings is conceptually linked to Horses Running Endlessly, demonstrating Orozco’s insurmountable ability to examine his intellectual preoccupations through wildly different aesthetic approaches. In his Samurai Tree paintings, first exhibited at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 2004, Orozco again incorporates the knight’s movement in chess, this time representing it through intricate configurations of circles painted on canvas. Using computer software to develop the patterns, Orozco begins each Samurai Tree from a single point, which he considers a center of gravity. Depending on the starting point and the artist’s intention, each painting results in a different arrangement of circles and lines. Having established this graphic pattern, Orozco colors in the halves and quadrants of each circle based on the chess knight’s possible moves, only using red, white, blue, and gold. The present lot, Sequence