Untitled (an abstract composition)

Gabriel Orozco was born in Mexico in 1962 and currently lives in Paris. The Museum of Modern Art first presented his work in 1993, in Projects 41: Gabriel Orozco, the artist's first one-person exhibition in the United States; since then he has exhibited widely in international venues. Orozco’s work is held in the Museum's collection in the departments of Drawings, Painting and Sculpture, Photography, and Prints and Illustrated Books.

Jacob Samuel proofed the hard-ground etching with Orozco in Paris and printed the edition of 200 copies at Edition Jacob Samuel, Santa Monica, California. The image, measuring 6" x 6", was printed on Shikibu black Gampi paper and pressed to a sheet of Magnani Pescia paper. For One Printed Page 1, The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art provided essential funds for travel.

This edition launched "One Printed Page," an occasional series of printed ephemera and small prints published by the Library Council. To begin the series, and to mark the opening of the Museum's new building in November 2004, Gabriel Orozco created Untitled, an etching with chine collé.

Untitled combines visual complexity with conceptual clarity to achieve an ambiguous image rooted in both abstraction and representation. The work presents a maze of surfaces and densities, symmetries and asymmetries, chambers and diagrams. Embedded in a black square erratically crossed with horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines, a series of concentric rings converge on a central circle enclosed by mandorlas that stretch across the field's cardinal axes to its edges. Evoking the human eye, this central matrix emerges out of, and grounds, competing geometric orders.