GABRIEL OROZCO: Partituras
Gabriel Orozco Exhibition view, Partituras, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2025 Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Alex Yudzon
Marian Goodman Gallery is very pleased to announce Gabriel Orozco: Partituras, on view in New York from, where the exhibition opened on 12 September and will close on 25 October 2025. For this exhibition, Orozco will present a new series of work which takes its starting point in music. Having played the piano improvisationally for many years, Orozco compares this practice to drawing in time and space, using sound and acoustics. The Partituras paintings explore the translation of these musical sketches into his distinctive geometric language, creating works that resonate with shifting rhythms and tempos.
Gabriel Orozco Exhibition view, Partituras, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2025 Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Alex Yudzon
In her text on the new series, the art historian Briony Fer writes: “if Orozco’s unlikely course in this new body of work explores a relationship to music, it is, of course, not in search of the spiritual in art. Instead, he turns this mythic origin on its head to break the musical score down into its most basic material units; instead of striving for the vibration of the soul, he explores the vibrations within a particular situation. Orozco treats the musical score as an interface between the act of playing the piano and the act of making a painting. They are not inspired by the music of a particular composer like, say, Brancusi making a sculpture in response to a piece by Erik Satie. In this case, the relationship between painting and music is absolutely not the ‘theme’ of the work, but simply provides a procedure – and a space to work in and through a set of rules that he sets himself.”
Gabriel Orozco Exhibition view, Partituras, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2025 Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Alex Yudzon
Elaborating on the process Orozco uses to create the Partituras, Fer writes that it “is a series of translations, that take place over an extended period of time. It’s a variation on the way Orozco made the Samurai Tree paintings based on the rotation of the knight’s move in chess. But now there are several stages involved: from playing, to recording, to listening, to transcribing, to drawing, to transferring, to painting. These allow for multiple spatial and temporal transpositions. It’s important that the titles consist only of the date and the time he played the piece on the piano, although evidently the painting we are seeing has undergone several phases to become the precision diagram that it is. The process is circuitous – but as Orozco has said, it’s possible a musician could actually ‘read’ the Partituras paintings and make musical sense of them. There are certainly aspects of encoding and recoding that happen as he turns the score into his own system of geometry. In the process, one could say that the artist creates his own semiotic system, translating each individual note into a corresponding sign. After all the mediations involved in the process of making them, perhaps the paintings can be seen as ‘time-pieces’ of an unconventional kind, where the medium of time itself is at stake.”
Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962) divides his time between Mexico City, Paris, Tokyo, and New York. A major retrospective of his work traveled from 2009 to 2011, starting at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and moving on to the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland, the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Tate Modern, London. His most recent exhibition was held at the Museo Jumex in Mexico City (2025). In 2025 Orozco received the Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. Over the last decade, Orozco has developed a number of permanent landscape design projects for museums and public spaces which include the South London Gallery garden (2013-2016), Chapultepec Park in Mexico City (2019-2025), and the Leeum Museum garden in Seoul (2022-2025). Latest publications on Orozco’s work include Politécnico Nacional, with texts by Briony Fer and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, (Rizzoli, 2025), Working Tables / Spacetime, text by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (Marian Goodman Gallery, 2024), and Diario de Plantas (Zolo Press, 2023).
Gabriel Orozco Exhibition view, Partituras, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2025 Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery Photo credit: Alex Yudzon
About Marian Goodman Gallery
Marian Goodman Gallery champions the work of artists who stand among the most influential of our time, representing over five generations of diverse thought and practice. What makes the gallery singular is its enduring and deep-rooted collaborations and understanding with the artists—a bond that is concurrent with curators, thought leaders, and art institutions worldwide. The Gallery’s exhibition program, characterized by its caliber and rigor, provides international platforms for its artists to showcase their work, foster vital dialogues with new audiences, and advance their practices within nonprofit and institutional realms.
Our enduring legacy persists through the combined strength and leadership of Partners Rose Lord, Emily Jane Kirwan, Leslie Nolen, and Junette Teng whose extensive tenure with the gallery and its distinguished roster of artists began under Founder Marian Goodman.
Established in 1977 by Goodman, who had earlier co-founded the art publishing company, Multiples, Inc., the Gallery gained prominence early in its trajectory for introducing the work of seminal European artists to American audiences. Synchronous with the mission at hand, Marian and the Gallery were inevitably drawn to Europe, establishing a Paris location in the Marais district in 1995 and an adjacent space for books and editions in 2017. From 2014 until 2022, the Gallery also operated an exhibition space in London.
With its desire to expand and explore growing areas of interest for its artists, the Gallery recently moved its New York City headquarters to the historic Grosvenor building in Tribeca in October 2024 and inaugurated a new permanent space in Los Angeles in September 2023. With two major spaces anchoring each coast, and an ongoing program for over three decades in Paris, Marian Goodman Gallery is committed to further advancing new bodies of work and the creative practices of the leading contemporary artists of our time.
The artists in the Gallery’s program share a culture-critical approach to art, maintain extraordinary perception and integrity, and a tendency in their respective practices to propel the collective experience of art through empowering and sustaining relationships with others. These visionaries, with their distinctive means of expression and technical expertise, have been responsible for inspiring future artists and enriching the dialogue around art. Working in partnership with the Gallery leadership and directors, the artists have continually collaborated to create and stimulate the intellectual discourse within their own work and elsewhere - through their collective knowledge and expertise, the artists have created circles of impact and distinction that continue to impart, illuminate and ground us, and resonate through the industry.
The Gallery represents over fifty artists and estates working in the U.S. and internationally: Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Chantal Akerman, Giovanni Anselmo, Leonor Antunes, Nairy Baghramian, Lothar Baumgarten, Dara Birnbaum, Christian Boltanski, Daniel Boyd, Marcel Broodthaers, Maurizio Cattelan, James Coleman, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Tacita Dean, Rineke Dijkstra, Cerith Wyn Evans, Andrea Fraser, Bernard Frize, Dan Graham, Pierre Huyghe, Cristina Iglesias, Amar Kanwar, Agnieszka Kurant, An-My Lê, Steve McQueen, Julie Mehretu, Annette Messager, Delcy Morelos, Sabine Moritz, Maria Nordman, Gabriel Orozco, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Penone, Anri Sala, Matt Saunders, Tino Sehgal, Paul Sietsema, Robert Smithson, Ettore Spalletti, Tavares Strachan, Thomas Struth, Niele Toroni, Álvaro Urbano, Adrián Villar Rojas, Danh Vo, James Welling, Yang Fudong and Jongsuk Yoon.
In addition to its exhibition program, the Gallery’s continued legacy is strengthened by its institutional partnerships and philanthropic efforts. Through organizations such as The Marian Goodman Gallery Initiative in honor of the late Okwui Enwezor, a joint collaborative effort managed by the ICI (Independent Curators Intl.), and the Gallery’s education department, among others, the Gallery has continued to strengthen and expand opportunities for research, education, and access to higher levels of learning, and advocate for building stronger communities of diversity in the realm of art.
The exhibit opened on 12 September and will close on 25 October 2025 at the Gallery’s New York Location at 385 Broadway, New York, NY 10013. There was an opening Reception: 12 September 2025, 6-8 pm
For more information about the exhibit, please visit the Marian Goodman Gallery’s site. The gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.
