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  • Circling BackGabriel Orozco—painter, sculptor, provocateur—changes direction
  • Julia Cooke (bio)

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Orozco throwing boomerangs at his Pennsylvania farm, 2013.

(Oskar Landi)

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Gabriel Orozco is a mercurial artist, enough so that, not three minutes after I arrived at his West Village home with plans to head out into the city, he suggested that perhaps I might like to help him draw circles instead. Specifically, he wanted me to use multicolored tempera to paint inside rings he’d been tracing onto hefty paper squares. He was preparing new work for a large show, Gabriel Orozco: thinking in circles, at New York’s Marian Goodman Gallery. Most of the work was being shipped back from a gallery in Edinburgh and would be complemented by the tempera-on-paper pieces as well as a conceptual project involving free Spanish classes. Orozco is famously experimental, so when he asked me to paint, I thought, Sure, let’s give it a shot. But when he asked, “Do you have steady hands?” I felt compelled to warn him that drawing was never my strongest suit. The task seemed easy enough, but Orozco sometimes projects the studied geniality of someone who decides in each moment whom he will be to you, a geniality that feels as if it could flip, quietly and suddenly, into stony boredom or disapproval.

“Try it anyway,” he said, and grabbed a brush and gestured toward the kitchen island, where a young woman was already working. “The key is to be sure that the brush has enough paint that it stays put.” He reached into the thicket of paint jars on the island, behind a dozen sixinch squares of paper on which he had traced thin pencil lines in strict circles atop a sepiatoned mottle of encrusted paint. He pulled out a jar from among the reds, greens, purples. A silver lid was flipped over, the tempera mixed, and Orozco presented me with a mustardtipped brush.

Orozco is neither short nor tall, soft at fifty-one but still fit, with a strong chin that’s often covered in white stubble and nearly shoulderlength gray hair that, pulled back into a ponytail, gives the impression of wanting to escape its rubber band. Orozco has often said that he has no studio and he has no assistant; he works in his homes—in New York, Mexico City, and Paris. But he has areas that resemble studios and people who resemble assistants: In the West Village brownstone, he works on the garden level, a cozy space with broad, oak-plank floors, French doors to the outside garden, and boomerangs and pointillistic test sketches hanging on the walls; to help him prepare for the show at Marian Goodman, he’d hired the woman sitting at the kitchen island, a graphic designer from Mexico who assured me that painting inside the lines wasn’t difficult. Orozco often discusses how he leans into a viewer’s disappointment as an aesthetic strategy. “I want to disappoint the expectations of the one who waits to be amazed,” he has said. Now he was almost barreling toward it. The tempera circles riffed on the one series of Orozco’s work that received near-universal rejection by critics, a series that played heavily in his upcoming show.

I grabbed a stool and got to work. Orozco lit a cigarette and walked around us with long, deliberate steps, then pulled up a chair, sat down and crossed his legs, tossed an arm across the chair’s back, and leaned to the side. I had finished drawing my mustard-colored circle and held it up for his approval. “Good,” he nodded, and stood up to trace another circle with a steely protractor. He sat back down and again settled into the chair crookedly, slanting almost out of it.

“So,” he said after a moment. “Is this going to be the sort of article where you’re going to say, ‘He opened the door, his house was like this, his couch was green’—like that, you know?”

The protected sand of Isla Arena, in a Baja California biosphere where gray and blue whales are born in...

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