Gabriel Orozco

Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

Claude Berri, Paris (acquired from the above in 2008)

Thence by descent to the present owner

New York, Marian Goodman Gallery, Gabriel Orozco, 2008

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the blue is much brighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Very close inspection reveals some minor burnishing and evidence of handling in places to the extreme outer edges. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Articulated through a hypnotically regulated spiral of clear-cut blue forms, Gabriel Orozco’s Blue Dandelion is a refined philosophical exploration into geometric abstraction and its potential to provide a cognitive expression of the laws that govern everyday life. As a crucial latter component of the artist’s practice which has held a longstanding concern for Topology – the area of mathematics concerned with the study of continuity and connectivity – the present work embraces a theme which has made Orozco one of the most ground-breaking cultural arbiters of his generation.

Orozco has been keen to make the near teleological aims of his practice clear: “The most important step for an artist, at least for me, is to re-establish, or at least develop contacts, or bridges, in our relationship with reality – the real, whatever it is. That thing that is outside of us, that thing we need to know, that we want to explore in order to understand the world, ourselves and the time we are living in” (Gabriel Orozco quoted in: Jessica Morgan, Gabriel Orozco, London 2011, p. 16). The work is a beautifully calibrated construction, which hangs in a profound position between order and disorder, expressing both the law of numbers and the serendipity of chance. With a ruinous combination of structural totality and partial effacement, the individual fragments appear whimsically scattered, yet simultaneously subservient to an internal logic. We encounter a complex code that appears indecipherable at a glance; an homage to ungraspable overarching systems of order found in nature, perfectly summated in the familiar form of the flower which scatters its perfectly uniform seeds at random. In this sense Blue Dandelion becomes an allegory for man’s interaction with the surrounding world and the unending quest to demystify and understand the profundity of nature’s rules.

Whilst immediately referencing a set of white Blue Dandelion sculptures that the artist created with renowned Parisian fake flower manufactures, Masion Guillet, in 1998, the work also recalls Orozco’s iconic 1997 work Black Kites, in which he inscribed a geometric checkerboard-like grid onto a human skull. The inherent collision of arbitrary happenstance and systematic logic can also be rooted in the preceding and iconic series of works known as the Samurai paintings. Here Orozco created beautifully simplistic diagrams of adjacent circles, emanating from a central point with their size and position generated by use of a computer, and with the colour pattern following the movements of a knight on a chessboard. Employing overlapping geometric circles in which randomly selected parts are erased, only traces of the original forms are left as ghost-like presences.

As part of a desirable series that has never before come to auction, the present work is paired down to its most simplistic form, resulting in an exquisite elegance. Orozco masterfully substantiates his longstanding interest in the Greek concepts of Atomism – in which the work rests between two contrasting states of atom and void – whilst toying with the aesthetics of Russian constructivism. Focusing on the remains and the interstitial spaces between circles, Blue Dandelion evokes the movement of bodies colliding, intersecting and generating new life in-between. The work forms a profound pictorial allegory for the dried seeds of the iconic flower that it references: perfectly and symmetrically regulated in their initial form of display, their destiny is bound to chance dispersion by the wind.