PANTA RHEI
"Everything flows" in ancient Greek, sentence attributed to Heraclitus.

Chantal Crousel gallery is pleased to present a new body of works by Gabriel Orozco, conjointly with the exhibition of Shades Between Rings of Air at Marian Goodman gallery.

The equilibrium in the universe - the phenomena of gravity, growth, erosion, mutation - have been in the center of Orozco's interest since over twenty years. The recent works pursue his reflexions on circularity, nature and artifice, movement and time.

Entering the gallery, the viewer is taken away by a cloud of large mobiles, the Roiseaux, hybrids of bamboo branches and feathers. The floating bodies evoke an underwater or an aerial world. Their continuous ballet forms a fluid and shimmering landscape. This universe changes, organisms expand from vegetal to animal. An organic process of flux initiates sequences of movements, linking the work to the passage of time. The oscillation between nature and artefact has been the subject of previous pieces (Mixiotes, Dandelions, Moon Trees, Spumes). With these new sculptures, Gabriel Orozco's fascination for animals and plants finds a new and surprising symbiosis.

The Roiseaux are ponctuated by a series of photographic diptychs, combining snapshots taken by the artist over the course of several years, in different parts of the world, without concern for chronological or geographical consistency. He associates natural forms with "cultivated" patterns. Like his mobiles, these dual photographs are hybrids, or as indicated by their title, Metonymies; they evoke a whole which expresses more than the elements contained in the image. 1 + 1 = universe.

For his new series of ceramics titled Orthocenter, the artist was interested in how the rotation, gravity and fluidity of a mass generates geometric shapes. This group of sculptures is the result of Orozco's research on the shape of the triangle, the orthocenter, and the Euler line. 

Orthocenter Views is a grid of 99 photographs that highlights the transformation of the masses of clay by the artist's hands, witnessing their evolving facets, changing expressions of light and shadow.

The video Boulder Hand shows the uninterrupted rubbing of a stone by the artist's hand, that shapes and polishes its surface, like a river eroding the stones of its bed.

Gabriel Orozco was born in 1962 in Jalapa, Veracruz, Mexico.His first personnal gallery show took place at Chantal Crousel’s in 1993, when he created La DS. In 2010 and 2011, the work of Gabriel Orozco was the subject of a traveling retrospective in four renowned museums: the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Kunstmuseum in Basel, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Tate Modern in London. His exhibition Asterisms can be seen at the Deutsche Guggenheim until 21 October 2012. Next year, his work will be presented at the Kunsthaus in Bregenz (Austria)

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