Gabriel Orozco has spent four decades harnessing play’s power to spark creative thinking. In ‘Politécnico Nacional’ (National Polytechnic) at Museo Jumex in Mexico City – the pioneering conceptual artist’s first museum show in his homeland since 2006 – curator Briony Fer presents 300 materially disparate artworks across four floors, each themed around air, earth, water and compost. This organization argues that one core force unites his polymath practice: the gambit.
Six Toilet Ventilators (1997) ceiling fans swirl over the show’s top floor, the breeze stiffening their billowing toilet-paper streamers. Orozco’s greatest hits lie beneath, illustrating his talent for thwarting expectations with singular moves. An edition of his iconic compacted Citroën, La D.S. (Cornaline) (2013) still delights. Horses Running Endlessly (1995) seems similarly recognizable at first. Closer inspection reveals the chessboard has too many squares, colours and knights, all poised to play an infinite game. Numerous paintings from Orozco’s ‘Samurai Tree’ series (2006–ongoing) appear too, their tessellated red, blue and gold-leaf circles foiling expectations of symmetry, adhering instead to the pattern of a knight’s movements across a chessboard. Visitors reliably crowd Oval Billiard Table (1996), another game with colonial heritage, attempting to shoot one of two cue balls into the oscillating red one suspended from the ceiling.
The floor below grounds itself in earth, through artworks employing organic matter like feathers, leaves, spit and clay. In Colour Travels Through Flowers (1998), abstract yellow, blue and magenta blossoms on paper flutter from the ceiling. Orozco created these blooms, however, using runoff dye from factories manufacturing fake flowers, complicating the boundary between organic and inorganic. Just beyond them lies Empty Shoe Box (1993) – precisely what its title describes. The readymade makes analogous inquiries about the line between trash and art.
Dozens of Orozco’s lesser-exhibited photographs from the 1990s through the 2010s anchor ‘Politécnico Nacional’, many immortalizing ephemeral public interventions. For Crazy Tourist (1991), Orozco placed a single orange atop each empty trestle table in a Brazilian market, punctuating its tranquillity after hours. Around the corner hangs Until You Find Another Yellow Schwalbe (1995), 40 photographs documenting the artist’s own bright bike alongside identical models that he scouted out around Berlin. These photos pair visual puns with measures of melancholy. Cat in the Jungle (1992), for instance, depicts a supermarket shelf of canned green beans rearranged around a tin of cat food. A lone feline peers out from its label.
The artist’s father was Mario Orozco Rivera, a respected third-generation Mexican muralist. Although he’s also eschewed the studio for the streets, the younger Orozco is advancing the tradition in a far more subtle fashion. His most notorious public work – spearheading renovations of the capital city’s Chapultepec Park – receives just two nods. An aerial map annotated with early notes sits nestled amongst the show’s crowded earthen floor. The sole work on the subterranean ‘compost’ level, a new video collage of commentary about Orozco scraped from social media, TV and more, features a clip where Mexican activist Carla Escoffié frets over the government’s questionable methods of seizing the park.
In the aquatic-themed room between, two dozen ‘River Stones’ (2013–15) – diorite rocks on which Orozco has carved abstract forms – surround Dark Wave (2006), a resin-cast whale skeleton decorated with circular graphite patterns, which hangs so low that viewers can enter its belly. Clustered throughout the outdoor terrace enveloping this space are 165 Accelerated Footballs (2005), dilapidated then embellished with similar circles. Here, gallery-goers congregate to watch other visitors play Orozco’s Ping Pond Table (1998/2025) in the plaza below. Like the original, this iteration features four curved table-tennis boards arranged around a central void – filled, this time, by a garden rather than a pond. For all his conceptual explorations, Orozco enjoys the most impact when inviting the public to join in his games.
‘Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional’ is on view at Museo Jumex, Mexico City, until 3 August.
Main image: Gabriel Orozco, ‘Politécnico Nacional’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Museo Jumex; photograph: Gerardo Landa & Eduardo López (GLR Estudio)
