“A spirit of constant invention makes [Gabriel Orozco’s] production one of the most intriguing and original of his generation,” wrote Glenn Lowry in the catalogue for the artist’s 2009 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Orozco was born to a highly educated and artistic family in Mexico, his father being a third-generation muralist in the tradition of David Alfaro Siqueiros, José Clemente Orozco and Diego Rivera. Yet, Orozco’s extraordinarily philosophical and conceptual art was not immediately appreciated by the Mexican art scene during his youth. Instead, he first became recognized in New York in the early 1990s, and then at the 1992 exhibition, America: Bride of the Sun, at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp—where Orozco exhibited along with Lucio Fontana and Cildo Meireles—that he truly launched his career.

From there, Orozco would go on to travel and exhibit around the world, renouncing the sanctified space of the traditional artist’s studio, and instead utilizing the everyday streets as his canvas. The present work, Samurai Tree 6C (2006), comes from one of the artist’s best known series, one that disrupts the viewer’s traditional notions of art by utilizing the medium of painting yet removing the artist’s hand completely, as well as his creative impulses. Rather, the series of Samurai Tree Invariants—begun in 2004 and each executed by either Philippe Piccoli or Christian Macia—has over 600 computer generated permutations designed by Orozco and based on a composition drawn into four quadrants, following a systematic series of circles bisected by dividing lines with rotating colors of red, blue, white and gold.