Gabriel Orozco

OSCAAR MOULIGNE is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Gabriel Orozco, on view from November 14, 2025, until March 28, 2026. The exhibition features new works that explore the artist’s engagement with systems of play and geometry, primarily through a suite of chess pieces that provide a window into the artistic process—how ideas form, evolve, and connect.

Tracing a historical lineage, drawings from the artist’s notebooks reveal adaptations from classic chess sets, such as the Chavet and Zagreb designs, while articulating a dialogue within Orozco’s practice around structure and movement. Building on these drawings, Orozco spent 18 months working closely with a Kyoto-based carver specializing in traditional Japanese woodworking, to create a chess set based on standard tournament sizes and fully functional for game play. The “prototypes” that comprise the installation and document the unfolding of a sculptural process, are made of varieties of Japanese wood—namely hinoki (cypress), keyaki (zelkova), and kokutan (ebony)—as well as red and black Japanese lacquer.

Orozco’s work often explores existing structures in urban spaces or in social, cultural, and natural systems. Through subtle interventions in everyday life, he reveals hidden geometries and logic. Among these frameworks, chess has served as a recurring metaphor: a field where systems of order are intersected by poetic openness and play, as seen in earlier works such as Horses Running Endlessly (1995) and the artist’s ongoing Samurai Tree series of paintings.

Other works on view in the exhibition include Infra-mince Suiseki (2025), in which a scholar’s rock is paired with a shimmering layer of fabric inserted between the stone and its base, as a representation of a landscape. Beetle Scrolling (2025), a collage on the reverse side of a traditional hanging scroll, together with Sand paper and cake box (2025) and Tre Marie cake box (2025), further demonstrates how Orozco’s interventions and artistic practice invite viewers to find poetry in the ordinary, and how intersecting systems—visual, social, natural, or mathematical—overlap, organize, and open up the world around us, as if tracing the paths of a knight on a chessboard.