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Fleurs fantômes

Fleurs fantômes Gabriel Orozco - Fleurs fantômes
Catalogue of Orozco's eponymous in-situ work at Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire: inspired by the princely apartments's old tapestries, the installation looks back at the castle's history and draws on a reflection on memory.
Gabriel Orozco visited the old guest apartments of Prince and Princess de Broglie (the last private owners of Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire) for but a few moments when his gaze was drawn straight to the torn wallpaper remains—so discreet that they were no longer noticed. These faded impressions, modest vestiges, extremely fragile traces of a past now behind us, immediately captured the imagination of this exceptional artist, who had been invited to “take over the château” as part of a special commission for the Centre-Loire Valley region. In his fascination with the remnants of the old tapestries that once graced the walls of these rooms—closed off and forgotten about since 1938—Orozco devoted hours to studying the palimpsest of the floral tapestries, still hanging on these old walls: photographing them over a considerable amount of time whilst listening to the echoes of ages past. For in these very rooms, now consigned to history, kings and queens from all over Europe once spent time and slept—sometimes for just a few hours—at the turn of last century, invited as guests to sumptuous parties and celebrated hunts. The artist, whose work is inspired by the quest for traces, remnants, marks left by men, has chosen an approach that looks back at the history and memory of the château at Chaumont-sur-Loire. In these fragments of old, timeworn, threadbare tapestries, Gabriel Orozco detected traces of these lives now long gone by: a matrix of a subtle meditation on space and time. The works on display in the “guest bedrooms” of the château evoke the details and the damage of the ancient wallpaper, whose elegant floral motifs have been recreated using a unique, time-consuming process of spraying oil onto canvas. The faltering impression mirrors the feeling of unease that grips visitors as they encounter these works and these blemished walls that are now in plain sight. In this way Orozco reveals not just the designs and colors that had until now faded into the background, but also the emotion suspended in the rooms. Through this poetic promenade, along the walls and complex walkways of the west and south wings of two floors of the château, Orozco invites us to partake in a dialogue with the mystery and the memory of a unique environment that is rendered omnipresent.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Domaine Régional de Chaumont-sur-Loire – Center for Arts and Nature, from April 5, 2014, to December 31, 2016.
Gabriel Orozco (born 1962 in Jalapa) grew up in Mexico City in the cultural milieu of the Mexican left which was linked to muralism, photography and the political literature of the sixties and seventies. He studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. He currently lives and works mainly in Tokyo and Mexico City.
Orozco gained his reputation in the early 1990s with his exploration of drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and expanding later to include painting. His work blurs the boundaries of art with everyday realities and often balances complex geometry with organic materials and elements of chance.
Orozco has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California (2000), The Serpentine Gallery, London (2004), the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico (2006), the Guggenheim Museum, New York (2012), the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2016), the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), Tokyo, Japan (2015), the Moderna Museet, Sweden (2014), and a major retrospective which traveled from the Museum of Modern Art, New York to the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland, the Centre Pompidou, Paris and the Tate Modern, London (2009-2011).
Gabriel Orozco has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Honoris Causa Award, University of the Arts, Havana, Cuba (2015); the BlueOrange Prize (2006); and the DAAD Artist in Residence, Berlin, Germany (1995). He has participated in the Venice Biennale several times (2017, 2005, 2003, and 1993) and Documenta (2002, and 1997).
In 2016 Orozco completed the permanent Orozco Garden at the South London Gallery, UK, after almost three years of work. A unique, sculptural work, it was his first garden design and features over fifty varieties of plants. In 2019, Orozco was invited to design and coordinate the master plan for Chapultepec Park. In February 2023 Orozco celebrated the completion of his Calzada flotante (Floating Causeway). Designed by the artist as a large-scale pedestrian-only bridge, it is Orozco's first architectural public project in Mexico.
Texts by Chantal Colleu-Dumond and Patricia Falguières.

Graphic design: Paul Carlos, Pure+Applied, New York.

Published by Grappa Studio.
 
published in October 2016
bilingual edition (English / French)
22 x 30 cm (hardcover, cloth binding)
152 pages (color ill.)
 
ISBN : 978-2-7466-8830-8
EAN : 9782746688308
 
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