Exhibitions
Gabriel Orozco's living machine returns to its place of origin
Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional is the Museo Jumex's major exhibition featuring the artist, featuring more than 300 subjects that explore the Xalapa-Enríquez native's wide-ranging and influential practice. Curated by Briony Fer, the exhibition and detailed tour will be on view until August 3. The title directly alludes to the artist's interdisciplinary and technical approach, playing with rotation, symmetry, and the materialization of time.
View of the exhibition Gabriel Orozco: National Polytechnic, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, 2025. Photography: Gerardo Landa & Eduardo López
This is Orozco's first major retrospective exhibition in Mexico since 2006, even more comprehensive than previous exhibitions created at MoMA, Pompidou or Tate Modern, and it does so with emblematic works such as Ping-Pong Table with Pond from 1998 and Whale Skeleton from 2006.
The artist's living machine transforms the museum into moving pieces where the public can interact with a career spanning nearly four decades. It's surprising to see Orozco constantly returning to his starting point. "Thinking about the artist's multiple techniques isn't just a question of whether he uses traditional artistic techniques such as carving or casting, enamel or impasto. It's more about asking how he uses the tools of rotation and symmetry, among other modus operandi, ways of working, to create new relationships and correspondences between things," explains Briony Fer, a key figure in Orozco's work for more than two decades, as one of the main researchers of his creations.
New Tree, Gabriel Orozco, 2006
The exhibition is not categorical, as it represents a turning point and an opportunity to assess Orozco's current artistic situation. The works on display come from the Jumez Collection, as well as from 36 institutions and private collectors from the Americas, Europe, and Asia, including the artist Gabriel Orozco himself.
Orozco returns to Mexico with a body of work that includes photographs, sculptures, installations, public projects, drawings, and paintings; it is conceptual in nature and not defined by its stylistic characteristics. The Museo Jumex presents Orozco's first major exhibition in a museum in his country in some twenty years since his 2006 exhibition at the Palacio de Bellas Artes.
View of the exhibition Gabriel Orozco: National Polytechnic, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, 2025. Photography: Gerardo Landa & Eduardo López
Four floors of the museum are occupied by the Mexican artist's works, showcasing his best-known works, articulated through references to nature: air, earth, and water. On the ground floor, there is a video featuring interviews and reactions to the Chapultepec project.
