Beschreibung:

MEXICAN Gabriel Orozco Untitled (Tríptico Azul) 2001 acrylic on paper 18 3/8 x 29 1/8 in. (46.7 x 74 cm) Signed and dated "Gabriel Orozco 2001" lower right.
Provenance Kurimanzutto Gallery, Mexico City Private Collection Catalogue Essay Mexican sculptor and conceptualist Gabriel Orozco emerged in the early 1990s as one of the most fascinating artists of his generation. Intentionally blurring the boundaries between art and reality with unmatched intellectual precision, Orozco has created a prolific oeuvre of drawings, photographs, sculptures, and installations without ever limiting himself to a singular style. He is known for maintaining a pervasive yet diverse aesthetic in order to engage the shortcomings of our perception of reality. As such, Orozco’s work frequently addresses the relationship between art and audience by focusing on oft-ignored objects in contemporary life. After receiving rigorous traditional training at the National School of Plastic Arts in Mexico, Orozco formed a coalition with the intent of emancipating young artists from the insular nationalism that, according to him, defined the country’s contemporary art scene. At this time Orozco’s work began to defy the formal ideologies on which his education was based. His practice developed into improvised sculptures devoid of any relationship with the traditional narrative of art history, yet they captured a sense of the past by directing the viewer’s attention to the way a form changes over time. By creating sculptures through found objects and photos taken in the streets, Orozco took art beyond the studio and captured the realism of Mexico’s political and social diversity. The present lot, Untitled (Triptico Azul), was created in 2001, the same year Orozco was crowned “the leading conceptual and installation artist of his generation” by the New Yorker. Known for his nomadic lifestyle, Orozco is often globe-trotting for inspiration. As a material manifestation of his geographic mobility, he placed sheets of paper in his suitcases during the course of his travels, symbolizing ongoing maps that folded and crumpled. Throughout time, both the meaning of the papers and their spatial formation changed due to unpredictable factors existing in time and place. Orozco’s hope was that the works would reveal who he was at different moments, and how his environment affected his mindset and his perception of reality. He applied paint to emphasize the emotion and physical labor that took place in his journeys. The spontaneous manner in which the cobalt blue is scattered throughout this lot exemplifies his intent. As Orozco stated, “The colors of my paintings are transcurrent between the fields. They are conceptually performing a three-dimensional move.” (Orozco quoted in: A. Temkin, Gabriel Orozco New York, 2009, p. 203) Emblematic of Orozco’s conceptual approaches, these works on paper are unique in that they were created to behave more like sculptures than paintings. Upon initial viewing, the horizontal axis on which the piece is hung suggests a traditional painterly intention, almost like a landscape. However, his randomized process of folding and crumpling paper gives the piece a three-dimensionality commonly associated with sculptural objects. Compositionally, the work marries both organic and inorganic form. It maintains a guise of traditional artistic aesthetics while simultaneously introducing randomized sculptural and performative gestures. Like in many of his paintings, Orozco obliterates the vanishing point, which he sees as a main characteristic of conventional painting. His approach brings to light the connection between medium, form, and artistic intervention. Like many of Orozco’s sculptures, Untitled (Triptico Azul) manifests the artist’s creative exploration by subtly altering common objects to reveal a new way of looking at something familiar. As the artist states, “People do leave traces in their wake: the refuse and detritus of history; the variegated remnants of daily life; or dust. A Trace is ephemeral, a locus of ambivalence suspended in the unstable space between construction and dispersal, presence and a