"Politécnico Nacional" explores recurring themes in the work of Gabriel Orozco (62 years old), such as rotation, symmetry, and the materialization of time. The exhibition is organized around three ideas or elements: "Air," "Earth," and "Water," reflecting the artist's interest in nature and its interaction with the anthropized environment.
These ideas are complemented by a personalization of a Duchampian world that runs throughout his work, hybridizing the manual and the mechanical, order and accident, as well as the out-of-place everyday object versus the "objet trouvé." These ideas solicit and invite everyone to interact with them, initiating a game of exploration and participation, where chance and coincidence become the main protagonists of this exhibition.
Installation view of the exhibition Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional. Museo Jumex, 2025. Photograph by Gerardo Landa & Eduardo López (GLR Estudio).
The presentation of the works, a set of constellations, is defined by Gabriel Orozco not only as a set of stars but as a grouping of material objects that are found in time and space, including the types of juxtapositions and relationships between the objects.
"Thinking about Orozco’s multiple 'technics', isn’t just a matter of thinking about whether he uses traditional artistic techniques like carving or casting, glazing or impasto. Rather, it’s to ask how he uses tools of rotation and symmetry, amongst other modus operandi — that is, other ways of working — in order to create new relations and correspondences between things. In the process, he unsettles what we think we know about the world.”
Briony Fer, Curator of the exhibition "Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional".
The exhibition deliberately avoids a chronological order, presenting the works in a seemingly disorderly manner to restore the original intent with which Orozco created them. This approach seeks to preserve their essence, reignite their dialogue with the observer, and reactivate their latent inner meaning. It invites a reading that challenges formalities and linear interpretations of cataloguing.
Installation view of the exhibition Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional. Museo Jumex, 2025. Photograph by Gerardo Landa & Eduardo López (GLR Estudio).
Approaching this metaphorical definition of the artist, Gallery 1 is an aquarium that doubles as a sculpture garden. Gallery 2 exudes a vegetal atmosphere, showcasing living matter from its wildest state to the artificiality of gardens. Gallery 3 is filled with floating, airy, and aerodynamic substances.
The museum's basement is the compost heap, a composition of ideas and voices. Rather than adhering to a classical model of transcendental and timeless essences, the elements of air, earth, and water are part of a cosmology of matter and objects in Orozco's practice, always in motion, always in circulation.
Outside in the Plaza del Museo Jumex, we see again Ping Pong Table with Pond (2025), one of the many game-based works shown in the exhibition and exemplifying the artist's interest in the idea of sculpture in the public realm.
"Looking at his entire body of work, it is striking how many of the interests he developed as a young artist still preoccupy him today. From the outset, he was interested in games, both real and imagined and especially in the precarious relation between rules of play and the effects of chance. The question of what it means to make a move in a game–and so to imagine art as a series of moves or gambits that will lead in unpredictable directions–continues to drive his practice".
Kit Hammonds, Chief Curator, Museo Jumex.
Gabriel Orozco, born in Xalapa, Veracruz, has been considered a key figure in contemporary art since the 1990s. His ability to transform everyday objects into works that question the boundaries between art and life has been internationally recognized. In addition to his artistic output, Orozco has led large-scale public projects, such as the Master Plan for Chapultepec Park in Mexico City.
