Museo Jumex presents “Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional”, the artist’s first museum exhibition in Mexico since 2006. A museum-wide survey that includes 300 objects displayed over 4 flooring and the museum’s public plaza, the exhibition explores key themes in Orozco’s apply, showcasing how he has continually challenged what artwork could be and the way it’s made. “Politécnico Nacional” reveals how the artist’s a number of methods and methods have developed over the course of a celebrated profession that started within the early Nineties.
Every flooring of the exhibition prompts completely different features or components inside Orozco’s apply. The order just isn’t chronological however as an alternative based mostly on the artist’s interrogation of the fissure between his work and the world, questioning the place one ends and the opposite begins.
In Orozco’s vocabulary, “constellations” refer not solely to planetary or astronomical techniques but in addition lengthen to groupings of fabric objects in time and house, together with the sorts of juxtapositions and relations between issues in an exhibition. On this regard, the ambiance of Gallery 3 is crammed with floating, aerated and streamlined matter. Gallery 2 two is vegetal, showcasing an entanglement of life matter, starting from the primordial to the artifice of gardens. Gallery 1 is an aquarium but in addition capabilities as a floor of motion, main onto the dry world of the terrace that additionally doubles as a sculpture backyard. The basement layer-1 is the compost, a composite of concepts and voices. Slightly than adhering to a clas- sical mannequin of timeless, transcendental essences, the weather of air, earth, and water are a part of a cosmology of matter and objects in Orozco’s apply, at all times in motion, at all times in circulation. The artist has created a brand new model of Ping Pond Desk (2025) carved in stone, for the Museo Jumex Plaza. Guests will be capable to work together with the paintings, which options two ping pong tables sliced and organized round a man-made pond. Ping Pond Desk is considered one of many works based mostly on video games on present within the exhibition and exemplifies the artist’s lengthy curiosity within the concept of sculpture within the public sphere.
“Gabriel Orozco is no doubt one of many main Mexican up to date artists who has been an equally definitive determine in worldwide artwork over the previous 4 many years,” stated Eugenio López, President of Fundación Jumex. “As evidenced on this exhibition, Orozco’s inventive vary is extraordinary, encom- passing pictures of straightforward actions and observations in streets and markets; a modest and fragile sculpture manufactured from onion pores and skin; and an in depth drawing over a whole whale skeleton, to call however a couple of examples. Every new flip in his apply combines a playful, mild contact with a profound exploration of aesthetics. His extraordinary imaginative and prescient is as related in the present day because it was once I first encountered it.”
“Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional” is organized by Museo Jumex and curat- ed by Briony Fer, who for over 20 years has been considered one of Orozco’s major interlocutors and students on his work. Fer is a Professor of Historical past of Artwork at College School London and a Fellow of the British Academy. Works on dis- play embody a number of works from the Colección Jumex in addition to loans from 36 establishments and personal collectors from America, Europe, and Asia, together with the artist’s personal.
“Interested by Orozco’s a number of ‘technics,’ isn’t only a matter of enthusiastic about whether or not he makes use of conventional inventive methods like carving or casting, glazing or impasto,” stated Fer. “Slightly, it’s to ask how he makes use of instruments of rotation and symmetry, amongst different modus operandi—that’s, different methods of working—with a view to create new relations and correspondences between issues. Within the course of, he unsettles what we predict we all know concerning the world.”
Gabriel Orozco (Jalapa, Veracruz, 1962), a pivotal determine in up to date artwork for the reason that early Nineties, studied on the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas on the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (1981-1984) and the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid (1986-1987). He has held many solo exhibitions internationally, together with his main retrospective on the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico (2006). Politécnico Nacional will present Orozco’s extraordinary inventive vary spanning many alternative mediums–together with sculpture, paint- ing, pictures, drawing, and set up–in addition to his architectural initiatives and designs for gardens, parks, and bridges. The exhibition options some 300 works, together with lots of his most canonic items resembling 4 Bicycles (There’s At all times One Course) (1994), Darkish Wave (2006), and La DS (Cornaline) (2013), which turned him into one of many main artists of his technology.
“Taking a look at his complete physique of labor, it’s putting how most of the pursuits he developed as a younger artist nonetheless preoccupy him in the present day,” stated Museo Jumex Chief Curator Equipment Hammonds. “From the outset, he was taken with video games, each actual and imagined and particularly within the precarious relation between guidelines of play and the results of probability. The query of what it means to make a transfer in a recreation–and so to think about artwork as a sequence of strikes or gambits that can lead in unpredictable instructions–continues to drive his apply.”
at Museo Jumex, Mexico Metropolis
till August 3, 2025
