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Lot Essay
Painted in 2004, Spinning and Rotating marks an important moment in Gabriel Orozco’s career and is part of his Samurai Tree series, which signaled his return to painting after several years working primarily in sculpture, photography, and conceptual projects. The series quickly became one of Orozco’s most recognized bodies of work. The present work displays the artist’s interest in geometry, movement, and repetition; the composition follows a system based on the moves of a chess knight, where circles—painted in red, gold, and blue—divide, rotate, and expand along a horizontal axis. This rule-based structure creates a sense of rhythm and balance that feels both precise and natural. The painting continues ideas Orozco explored in his earlier Atomists series of the 1990s, where circles were used to map patterns of motion and impact. Here, those same forms take on a new clarity, unfolding across the white surface in a steady progression that captures Orozco’s fascination with systems of growth and variation. Allowed by the artist to be hung in any orientation, Spinning and Rotating further represents the myiads of possibilities and opportunities that Orozco wishes his Samurai Tree paintings to convey.
Orozco’s process of “beginning from the minimal point of the centre, and then develop[ing] the structure towards the frame as the limit” (G. Orozco, quoted in B. Buchloh, Gabriel Orozco in Conversation with Benjamin Buchloh, The Experience of Art: 51st International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, 2005) can be directly traced in Spinning and Rotating. The painting centers on a red-and-gold circle placed slightly below the midpoint of the white canvas. From this origin, a chain of circles extends horizontally to both sides in precise alignment. Each circle is divided into four quadrants, alternating between solid red, reflective gold, and matte blue. The sequence moves rhythmically across the surface, each circle rotating relative to the previous one so that no two arrangements repeat exactly. Toward the right turning edge, the intervals between circles narrow and the gold segments catch light in quick flashes that heighten the sense of acceleration. On the left, the blue quadrants dominate, creating cooler pauses that slow the progression and draw the eye outward. At the points where these circles overlap, small crescents and intersections appear, the borders crisp and deliberate, revealing how each new form grows directly out of the geometry of the last. The structure feels self-generating: an ordered field that seems to expand beyond the canvas while remaining bound by the precision of Orozco’s system.
This fascination with circular movement runs throughout Orozco’s practice. Earlier works such as his Atomists series from 1996 applied the same circular overlays onto found images, charting invisible fields of energy and collision. In Spinning and Rotating, that language of rotation becomes self-contained, its system no longer referencing the external world but generating its own order. The painting functions like a self-repeating algorithm, advancing through repetition and variation until it meets the limit of the canvas. Within its bounds, the composition sustains its own logic—mathematical yet organic, mechanical yet human. Orozco’s aim, as he later explained, was “to deal with the rotation of a body inside a flat plane... not in the illusion of the body, but in the conceptual representation of an image” (G. Orozco, interview with B. Fer, Gabriel Orozco, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, 2006, p. 109). Spinning and Rotating achieves precisely that balance: a system that feels alive, a painting that continues to move in the mind long after its pattern reaches the edge.
Orozco’s process of “beginning from the minimal point of the centre, and then develop[ing] the structure towards the frame as the limit” (G. Orozco, quoted in B. Buchloh, Gabriel Orozco in Conversation with Benjamin Buchloh, The Experience of Art: 51st International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, 2005) can be directly traced in Spinning and Rotating. The painting centers on a red-and-gold circle placed slightly below the midpoint of the white canvas. From this origin, a chain of circles extends horizontally to both sides in precise alignment. Each circle is divided into four quadrants, alternating between solid red, reflective gold, and matte blue. The sequence moves rhythmically across the surface, each circle rotating relative to the previous one so that no two arrangements repeat exactly. Toward the right turning edge, the intervals between circles narrow and the gold segments catch light in quick flashes that heighten the sense of acceleration. On the left, the blue quadrants dominate, creating cooler pauses that slow the progression and draw the eye outward. At the points where these circles overlap, small crescents and intersections appear, the borders crisp and deliberate, revealing how each new form grows directly out of the geometry of the last. The structure feels self-generating: an ordered field that seems to expand beyond the canvas while remaining bound by the precision of Orozco’s system.
This fascination with circular movement runs throughout Orozco’s practice. Earlier works such as his Atomists series from 1996 applied the same circular overlays onto found images, charting invisible fields of energy and collision. In Spinning and Rotating, that language of rotation becomes self-contained, its system no longer referencing the external world but generating its own order. The painting functions like a self-repeating algorithm, advancing through repetition and variation until it meets the limit of the canvas. Within its bounds, the composition sustains its own logic—mathematical yet organic, mechanical yet human. Orozco’s aim, as he later explained, was “to deal with the rotation of a body inside a flat plane... not in the illusion of the body, but in the conceptual representation of an image” (G. Orozco, interview with B. Fer, Gabriel Orozco, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, 2006, p. 109). Spinning and Rotating achieves precisely that balance: a system that feels alive, a painting that continues to move in the mind long after its pattern reaches the edge.