GABRIEL OROZCO

White Cube Seoul is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, featuring paintings and works on paper originating from his 2021–22 series titled ‘Diario de Plantas’.

September 4 – December 14, 2024

The selection of works on paper in this exhibition belong to these plant journals, begun during the Covid pandemic when the artist was living in Tokyo. The series evolved as part of a ritual whereby Orozco collected leaves from his surroundings, a practice he continued when he travelled to Mexico City to work on an ambitious public project to transform Chapultepec Park. Orozco’s process involved pressing the leaves directly into the notebooks’ pages, layering these imprints or superimposing them with his own drawings rendered in gouache, tempera, ink and graphite. The fibrous surface of the notebook paper acts as a receptive medium, allowing the pigment to seep through into the underside of the page.

The interplay between the artist’s simultaneously fluid and geometric markings and the structured organicism of the leaf-prints invites contemplation of the unique time of human-nature relations during which Orozco initiated his studies. A period now often referred to as the pandemic ‘anthropause’, it was a moment when the slowdown of human activity precipitated a concurrent rise in environmentally minded cultivation.

Negative spaces, accented through a range of reds, whites and gold, foreground the creature’s array of striped spines and regal, maned fins – plumage which can be interpreted as a spectrum of patterned animal life. Their structural silhouettes, meanwhile, recede into the background, yielding to large canopies of singular leaf-prints and dappled, watery surfaces created through the mix of tempera and watercolour.

The works in the current exhibition, are arguably more intricate and their structural devices appear more recessive, driven by cycles of organic states such as reproduction, growth, decomposition and fossilisation – elements which reflect not only the rhythms of nature, but the artistic process itself.