Marian Goodman Gallery is excited to announce an exhibition of new work by artist Gabriel Orozco. This will be Orozco’s first show at the New York gallery since moving away to Asia a few years ago. The turn to carving in Gabriel Orozco’s recent sculpture could be likened to his turn to painting on canvas in the early 2000s. Rather than assume that sculptural order has been restored by returning some fundamental property of sculpture that had seemed antithetical to his work up to this point, it hardly needs saying that sculpture has not looked like this for a good long while; and not since Adrian Stokes has the essence of modern sculpture been seen to be direct carving into stone. Rather, the hard to have predicted incorporation of carving into his longstanding engagement with sculpture shows how expansive any contemporary notion of sculpture must necessarily be.

Orozco made the first of his stone sculptures in Bali, Indonesia, where he has been living for the past two years and where carving, as in cutting into stone by hand, continues to be an important form of skilled artisanal labor. The works in this group are all made of limestone, a local material traditionally used in Balinese temple and domestic sculptural decoration. Working daily at a stonemason’s yard near his home near Ubud in the uplands of the island, he has drawn on traditional skills to combine local techniques with his own method of using circles to cut away at a solid form. While each sculpture is very different—some more crystalline, some more organic—each begins as a 30 x 30 centimeter cube of limestone. Orozco draws out the same arrangement of circles with a compass on each face of the block, providing the basic schema for the slow process of cutting away that ensues.

Limestone is extremely soft, and as the artist has said “inside this stone is just more stone, which is dust, which is particles of all kinds of minerals, which is sediment...” The stone is simply, in his eyes, “compressed dust.” From this point of view, the concepts behind his sculptures begin to sound more like Orozco’s other preoccupations with stone—or more precisely with stones. Evident in his notebooks from as early as 1992, he constantly registers thoughts like “point to a stone and call it art” as if a stone could stand in as a kind of natural readymade. The ubiquity of stones—or stone as compressed dust—puts them on a par with any ordinary thing, natural or synthetic, made or found. The name given to one group called Dés, in reference to the six-sided shape of a dice, also evokes the possibility of a rolling action and of a game of chance. Such unpredictable movements also trigger connections with works, from the plasticine Yielding Stone (1992) to the recent found and machine-carved river stones (2013).

The sculptures here can be seen as a series in a fluid, relational sense, but they are absolutely not serial or part of a serial progression. On the contrary, they are singular objects that relate to one another through scale and material, but deviate at the level of their architectonic structure, often drastically so. Other groups have followed in a variety of other harder materials such as red tezontle, grey recinto and black marble. These groups were made in Mexico, again carved by hand, but now using mechanical tools. The introduction of material variation allows different qualities to enter and transform the series. Tezontle and recinto are both volcanic stone and used in construction. The cutting away of volume creates ever more voids, exposing the tiny air holes in the highly porous rock.

There’s a meeting of geometry and geology in an architectonic construction of volcanic rock that was once lava and flowing. If the writer Roger Caillois, whom Marguerite Yourcenar called “the man who loved stones,” saw in his stone collection “a universal syntax,” then Orozco’s sculpture suggests otherwise. Rather, materials are not universal but subject to contingency and culture.