Mexico City
“Politécnico Nacional” (on view through August 3, 2025), Gabriel Orozco’s first museum show in Mexico since 2006 and his most expansive survey to date, presents the work of a global artist who nevertheless remains emblematic of Mexico City’s contemporary art scene. The exhibition, which fills four floors of Museo Jumex and extends out to its public plaza, encompasses more than 300 pieces created over four decades—including installation, sculpture, drawing, and photography—yet never feels glutted. Curator Briony Fer has avoided the burden of chronological presentation, opting instead for an arrangement based on what Orozco refers to as “constellations” of ideas that he returns to time and time again—the rules of play and chance, geometry and symmetry, perpetual motion and transformation—installed around the themes air, earth, water, and compost. Running parallel to Orozco’s driving forces of curiosity and play, there’s elegance, rigor, and minimalist restraint in his ongoing quest to break down and explore conceptual and theoretical concepts and uncover what connects us.
His greatest hits stand the test of time. La DS (Cornaline) (2013), the second edition of his reconstructed, slimmed-down Citroën, is painted a deep, seductive red, but engineless and impotent, its days of joy rides are long gone. The two carved stone ping pong tables of Ping Pond Table (1998/2025) are sliced apart and re-arranged in a lotus shape separated by a central pond garden. By removing the net and opening the game to four to eight players, Orozco creates a three-dimensional, “in-between” space. Oval Billiard Table (1996) also shape-shifts a participatory game, from rectangular to elliptical, with the added hypnotic chaos of a pendulum in perpetual rotation. In the absence of familiar logistics and order, players of this unorthodox game must surrender to the absurdity or make up their own rules—the first being to avoid getting smacked by the pendulum. Orozco admits that it can be boring, but as he told Art21: “I like to improvise games in situations, and then I like the rule just because the rule makes the game grow. I like to make a game grow by trying to understand the geometry of the situation.”
Such changeable and self-imposed rules also influence his aesthetic decision-making. Orozco limits color choices (to blue, red, white, yellow, and later gold); orders construction (working from the center outward or employing an L-shaped chess maneuver known as the “knight’s move”); and focuses on the geometric form of the circle as a device to represent connection and continual motion. He often uses local materials and artisanal techniques from wherever he is living (Tokyo, New York, Paris, Bali) to imprint his work with a cultural context. His readymade and reconfigured objects range from skulls, boomerangs, maps, and archaeological remnants to quotidian objects such as soccer balls, oranges, empty shoe boxes, and ceiling fans swirling toilet paper (Toilet Ventilators (Ventiladores toilet) [1997/2000]). Three examples from the “Working Tables” series allow a peek into his planning processes and collecting obsessions. In Working Table, Tokyo (2015–23), maquettes for the exhibition are placed alongside miniature sumo wrestlers and cars, spinning toys, local snack wrappers, sticks, kimono fabric swatches, and wooden blocks decorated with his signature geometric colors and shapes.
Orozco’s sly humor comes across in surreal architectural and sculptural interventions that he inserts into the urban environment, then photographs—triangle-cut sandwiches placed in the corners of stairs and cans of cat food positioned among watermelons and canned green beans in the market, the felines’ eyes floating, watchful, and ready to pounce. Chance encounters and mirroring lie at the heart of many works, including the 40-photograph installation Until You Find Another Yellow Schwalbe (1995), in which Orozco encounters an orange motorbike identical to his own, photographs the twins, then circles the streets of Berlin seeking and documenting additional doppelgangers. And in an ironic temporary work, he displayed his recently bestowed medal of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government as a placeholder for Éclaircie (2008–19), a loan from the Centre Pompidou that hadn’t arrived in time for the exhibition opening.
“Politécnico Nacional” takes on a more subdued and tactile tone as it descends to the earth-themed floor, where the focus shifts to process, nature’s cycles of growth and decay, and materials such as feathers, plants, stone, and clay. In several works featuring bones and human skulls, Orozco covers the surfaces with chessboard-style graphite squares, conflating painting and sculpture. Performance-type pieces like Yielding Stone (1992), a public artwork created from rolling a sphere equal to the artist’s weight through the street, and My Hands Are My Heart (1991), in which his fingerprints are forever imprinted like a hug on heart-shaped piece of molded clay, make recurring reference to the body and its traces.
Visitors exit the show through a glass-walled gallery evocative of an aquarium, where Dark Wave (2016), a 14-meter-long whale skeleton cast in resin, is suspended. Dark Wave serves as a companion piece to Mobile Matrix (2016), a permanent commission for the Biblioteca Vasconcelos in Mexico City, that Orozco created from an excavated whale skeleton. Both works are covered in a dizzying array of his signature graphite circles, which form a tattooed second skin in constant movement. The skeletons, one from the natural world and one a product of artifice, remain intertwined in a commentary on time and mortality.
Orozco’s influence on Mexico City’s art scene has been as boundary-pushing as his work, extending well beyond institutions and the traditional role of the artist. When I first met him in 2001, he had recently collaborated with Mónica Manzutto and José Kuri to launch kurimanzutto, a new style of gallery that would combine the experimentation and energy of pop-up shows turned into tequila-fueled, all-night dance parties with a dedicated support system for artists in a city starved for a professional art market. Almost two decades later, in a city now known worldwide for contemporary art, Orozco was appointed to create and lead the Chapultepec Park masterplan, exploring new ways of preserving, redeveloping, and experiencing the storied site. In the first stage, Calzada flotante (Floating Causeway) (2023) added expansive pedestrian bridges to connect the dissected park, part of Orozco’s vision to infuse functional sculpture and culture into the natural environment. With an impressive budget of around $500 million, the project has been met so far with both acclaim and criticism, a dialogue that Orozco welcomes.
