Gabriel Orozco at Museo Jumex in Mexico City

From February 1, 2025, through August 3, 2025, Museo Jumex in Mexico City presents “Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional,” the artist’s first museum exhibition in Mexico since 2006. This survey explores key themes in Orozco’s practice as he has constantly challenged what art can be and how it is made. Politécnico Nacional marks out a field of play in which to show how the artist’s multiple techniques and strategies–in shorthand, his “technics’”–have developed over the course of a celebrated career that began in the early 1990s.

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.

Orozco has also always interrogated art’s relationship to nature and the planet. In his vocabulary, “constellations” are not only part of a planetary system but also apply to groupings of real objects in time and space. In “Politécnico Nacional” the spaces of Museo Jumex become a multi-layered apparatus for creating connections, not just to show how the artist’s earliest works relate to his most recent projects, but to explore the connectedness between art and the everyday object-world that we inhabit. Air, earth and water become working elements to think with rather than unchanging transcendental essences. In the process, Orozco activates a cosmology of matter and objects, always in movement, always in circulation.

“This long-anticipated exhibition of Gabriel Orozco reminds us of the profound impact he’s had, not only in Mexico but across the global art scene,” Eugenio López, President of Fundación Jumex, said. “His ability to challenge our understanding of art–whether through delicate sculptures or monumental projects– keeps us surprised and engaged. Orozco’s work transcends boundaries, and it is an honor to share this diverse body of work, a testament to his decades- long commitment to reimagining the possibilities of contemporary art.”

Gabriel Orozco (Xalapa, Veracruz, 1962), a pivotal figure in contemporary art since the early 1990s, studied at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (1981-1984) and the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid (1986-1987). He has held many solo exhibitions across the world, including his major retrospective at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico (2006).

“Politécnico Nacional” will show Orozco’s extraordinary creative range spanning many different mediums–including sculpture, painting, photography, drawing, and installation–as well as his architectural projects and designs for gardens, parks and bridges. The exhibition features some 300 works, including many of his most canonic pieces such as Four Bicycles (There is Always One Direction) (1994), Dark Wave (2006) and La DS (Cornaline) (2013), which turned him into one of the leading artists of his generation.

For the exhibition a new outdoor version of Orozco’s Ping Pond Table (1998) will be installed in the plaza of Museo Jumex. People will be able to play with this piece that features two ping pong tables sliced and arranged around an artificial pond. This is one of many works based on games on show in the exhibition, and part of the artist’s long interest in the idea of sculpture in the public sphere.

Orozco’s masterplan for the Chapultepec Park, including his Calzada flotante [Floating Causeway] (2023), are his most far-reaching public project to date, transforming the use of a landscape in the middle of the city. Politécnico Nacional explores how these interests have always been in formation in his work, in his small-scale drawings and collages as much as his more monumental works. These are trajectories and processes that continue to evolve in the art he makes in response to specific situations in locations across the world.

“Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional” is organized by Museo Jumex and curated by Briony Fer, who for over two decades has been one of Orozco’s main interlocutors and scholars on his work. Fer is Professor of History of Art at University College London and Fellow of the British Academy.

Works on display include several works from the Colección Jumex as well as loans from 36 institutions and private collectors from America, Europe and Asia, including the artist’s own. The exhibition is accompanied by a substantial catalogue published by the Museo Jumex and Rizzoli Electa with an in-depth essay entitled “Poli-technics” by the curator and a conversation between artist, Fer and art historian Benjamin Buchloh.