Gabriel Orozco: Rotating Objects, a focused installation of ten works by Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962), seven Roto Shaku and three Obi Scrolls, will be on view at The Noguchi Museum as a complement to the major exhibition Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan. All created in Tokyo in 2015, Orozco’s works will provide a contemporary parallel to Noguchi and Hasegawa’s efforts to create modern art that developed Japan’s traditional craft cultures.

The Roto Shaku are made from a traditional standard length of lumber (somewhat akin to the cubit or the foot), wrapped in a range of colored tapes, all purchased from Tokyu Hands, the famous Japanese craft store. Employing his signature geometries, Orozco establishes a counterpoint between multiple traditions of abstraction and seeming abstraction: decorative patterning, practical mark making (as for measurement), and the theories of signs, symbols, and structures that underlie much of modern Western painting.