3 years ago1,000+ Views
Artist: Gabriel Orozco (Mexican, born 1962) Title: Kytes Tree Date:2005 Medium:Synthetic polymer paint on canvas Dimensions:6' 6 3/4" x 6' 6 3/4" (200 x 200 cm) Description: Curator, Ann Temkin: "Kytes Tree is one of Orozco's earlier paintings. He began making paintings really just the year before this and when he did so it came as a great surprise to even the people who were very close to his work. He began making the paintings rather secretly, because for himself it was quite a chance to take. Painting symbolized so many things that he didn't want his art to be about—an object that was formally interesting, but not necessarily having anything to do with daily life. What he did was work with this motif of the half circle, the quarter circle and the full circle, which were turned into patterns on the basis of a game of chance, which has its complicated set of rules that would determine what colors and what locations and how much of these fragments of circles would be deployed over the canvas. So these paintings are not the product of inspiration or even some kind of ideal vision but really, the work of, a very level-headed process that has to do with acceptance of chance. At the outset he was painting them himself. But it was not his goal to return to being a painter. What he did was find a collaborator named Phillipe Piccoli who he could teach how to paint these paintings, how to execute them in just the technique that he wanted. So these paintings are not a personal expression of Orozco's hand, any more than they are his creative expression. They are objects that he wanted to populate the world with."