An exhibition of new work, Orozco’s first in London since the 2011; he will present paintings, scrolls, sculptures, drawings and photographs made over the last year in Japan and Mexico.

Recommended by Jemima Burrill, Curator at The Now Gallery: I am looking forward to seeing Gabrial Orozco at Marion Goodman. Also check out the Fiona Tan exhibition at Frith Street, I loved her contemplative description of the Soane Museum. Two great commercial spaces.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a newly commissioned text, entitled Wrappings, by Briony Fer.

The itinerant nature of Gabriel Orozco’s practice has been a defining characteristic of his career, providing him with inspiration through travel and immersion in foreign cultures. In 2015 he took up residence in Japan where the majority of this exhibition was created, including a series of 28 collages on traditional scrolls.

The scrolls are displayed both on the gallery walls and in their own individual wooden presentation boxes. While the compositions are characteristic of Orozco’s complex formal experiments with interlocking circles, here they are constructed from appropriated swatches of traditional Japanese silks.

The circular motifs explored in these scrolls have been the subject of Orozco’s paintings since his first Samurai paintings made a decade ago. In his most recent paintings here, a mechanized spirographic repetition of a circular grid populates the canvas. Orozco chose which intersections of these circles to paint or gild, and which to be left blank, creating a plane of dispersed and deconstructing circles with captured interlocking sections. 

Experimenting with and altering found objects, Orozco crosses fluidly and fluently between varying modes of production. Something else that grew from his time spent in Japan are a series of wooden totemic sculptures made from drawing, painting and collaging found local materials. Made of components that are ubiquitously Japanese, comprised of the packaging material and other detritus of urban Tokyo, they are placed leaning against the walls and columns of the gallery space at varying intervals and heights. 

Gabriel Orozco was born in 1962 in Veracruz, Mexico. He lives and works between Paris, New York and Mexico City. Recent solo exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan (2015) Fleurs fantômes, commissioned by the Centre Region at Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, Loire, France (2014-15);Gabriel Orozco: Natural Motion at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2013) which travelled to the Moderna Museet, Sweden (2014); Thinking in Circles, at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2013); and Asterisms, at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin and the Guggenheim, New York (2012). From 2009-2011 a retrospective of the artist’s work traveled from the Museum of Modern Art, New York to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland and Tate Modern, London. Orozco’s first London solo exhibition took place at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1996).

Until 7 August