Artist:
Gabriel Orozco (born 1962 in Jalapa, Mexico; lives and works in New York City, USA; Paris, France; and Mexico City, Mexico).

Description:
“[At the 2003 Venice Biennale Shade Between Rings of Air] was placed next to the patio of the Italian Pavilion where stood the original concrete structure, named La Pensilina.

“La Pensilina, constructed by Carlo Scarpa in 1952, was conceived as a pergola within the inner patio of the Italian Pavilion, designed to house sculptures, plant,s and a fountain. In 2003 Orozco made this 1-to-1 replica in wood as a full scale model to be shown in an adjacent and quiet interior space of the Pavilion as a contrast to the original outside, already deteriorated by time and weather.

“After the original exhibition in Venice, Orozco’s Shade Between Rings of Air started to travel on its own and has been exhibited in various places, generating a geographical distance but nevertheless drawing parallels in time to the static pergola of 1952. As a [replica], this model structure became an independent mobile architectural object to be inserted into different contexts.”
—Galerie Marian Goodman press release for “Gabriel Orozco,” Slash, September 7, 2012.

“In 2003, Gabriel Orozco’s sculpture Shade Between Rings of Air was exhibited at the Venice Biennial. The work was a replica of La Pensilina (1952), a pergola by Italian architect Carlo Scarpa. Scarpa’s construction was part of his Sculpture Garden situated in the inner courtyard of the Italian Pavilion. Orozco’s Shade Between Rings of Air was fabricated in birchwood and placed in an interior space, in contrast to Scarpa’s exterior concrete structure. Orozco’s work was subsequently exhibited in diverse contexts, raising issues about site-specificity, cultural memory, and the dialectical relation between architecture and sculpture… Orozco’s work negotiates ideas related to architectural sculpture (and sculptural architecture), particularly the role of the replica and its spatiotemporal relation to the original, and examines how the artist internalizes aspects of modernist architecture and its aspirations to recast his identity as a sculptor at the turn of the twenty-first century.”
—Natasha Adamou, “Shade Between Rings of Air: Architecture, Sculpture, Replication; Carlo Scarpa/Gabriel Orozco, 1952/2003,” Sculpture Journal 25, no. 3 (2016): 1.