One of the standout highlights of this year’s Mexico City Art Week was internationally acclaimed artist Gabriel Orozco’s first career survey in decades in his home country. Titled “Politécnico Nacional,” the Museo Jumex exhibition underscores Orozco’s relentless anthropological and psychological exploration of the material realm, questioning the very structure of reality and the role of human creation within the perpetual flow of particles and the cosmic cycles of transformation. The artist has spent his career identifying, capturing or orchestrating moments where a mysterious order and universal harmony emerge—creating new relationships, correspondences and symmetries between things. Tracking possible mathematical and geometric relationships like a contemporary Pythagoras, Orozco’s practice seems guided by a desire to reveal the underlying harmony of existence through recurring numerical and formal patterns.
As the title suggests, the show positions Orozco as a kind of form engineer, assembling compositions where objects serve as both code and critique, revealing the political, economic and anthropological meanings embedded within their production, circulation and destruction. This framework might seem unusual for an artist trained at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, UNAM (1981-1984), a program more aligned with the humanities and social sciences, yet his travels and his endless observation of the human world have allowed him to develop a diverse range of techniques and approaches. “After the years of making my own technique on the road and unlearning so many things I learned in the academy, traveling between cultures and living in London, Paris, New York and now in Tokyo, I think one of my main reasons to be traveling has been looking for always new things to investigate,” he tells Observer. “That’s why sometimes it’s disconcerting how I change, or I have in different projects at the same time different scales and aesthetics.”
Rather than resisting this fundamental principle, Orozco embraces it. His art is coherently eclectic, taking form across mediums and styles with an extreme sense of freedom and playfulness. He constructs new constellations of meaning using a wildly diverse array of materials, objects and techniques, where organic and synthetic processes intertwine and integrate seamlessly. Orozco suggests this is why his work never feels repetitive, corporate, mass-produced or fabricated and instead remains playful, adaptive and endlessly resourceful. Though his practice spans ecosystems, economies and environments, at its core is a study of geometry in nature—between order and accident, the handmade and the machine-made, the readymade and the found object.
For this reason, the works in the show are not arranged chronologically but instead unfold as “constellations”—groups of material objects that fluidly reappear and recirculate in ever-shifting ensembles across time and space. “It’s more about subjects and the dynamics of game and creativity,” Orozco explains. As we move through the rooms, we navigate fragments of ordinary reality that align into new, unexpected aesthetic and symbolic forms. “I try to recycle the functionality of the object; everything is charged already. However, then you try to recycle their functionality in cultural terms, linguistic terms, political terms and physical terms because there’s also a relation with the body, with different specificities of culture and time. Then you apply your knowledge and feelings to try to develop a sign, environment or painting that combines all this.”
The notion of “Politécnico”—or polymath—relates geometry with mathematics and even philosophy, all of which are deeply embedded in his work. Through this approach, he interrogates the inherent instability and fluidity of the structures we use to decode a reality in constant flux. “Your position about particular things might change their reading and perception,” he reflects. The sense of scale in relation to time and space, history and cultures, and especially nature influences how one reads and operates within the surrounding reality.
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“Everything is part of a cycle, but at the same time, there are moments in which time is somehow frozen in memory, and you connect with something that becomes powerful.” This fleeting instant—when everything seems to align—is what Orozco seeks to isolate in his photographic works. “Photography has been a very useful instrument for me to capture things like the bread on the piano and material combinations, which are just a few seconds in existence.” A wide range of objects, seemingly brought together by chance yet often paradoxically arranged, creates unexpected juxtapositions and dialectic tensions that invite new interpretations beyond their ordinary function. That’s why cat food can be placed between watermelons and suddenly transform into tigers in the jungle (Gatos y Sandías), or the discarded skin of an onion from a dinner table can be elevated into a sculpture—a work of art in its own right.
Orozco’s fascination with circles and circular movements animates the entire exhibition, from the circular forms and diagrams inhabiting many of his paintings to the kinetic energy driving his sculptures and the very processes of creation and assemblage that define his practice. After all, from the vast orbits of galaxies to the microscopic biological cycles that sustain life, circular movements are fundamental forces—propelling the endless flow of energy and matter through the perpetual rhythms of existence.
Playing with the circulation and distribution of commodities, Orozco has, over the years, built his own compost of the material world where fragments and relics of ordinary life continuously recirculate in an operation of semantic and philosophical reactivation and resanitization. This process allows the epiphenomenon—the symbolic, emotional and sensory associations with an object—to take precedence over its phenomenological presence and functional purpose.
Though Orozco’s work is rooted in a postmodern, freely eclectic appropriation of art and cultural history, he has consistently rejected mainstream artistic trends. In the 1980s, he distanced himself from dominant movements such as Italian Transavanguardia, German Neo-Expressionism and Neo-Mexicanismo. Even today, he maintains an independent artistic approach, one that curator Briony Fer has described as a “deliberate diversion, deviation or even outright reversal” aimed at subverting an ordinary sense of reality.
Discussing his artistic references and sources of inspiration, Orozco cites the Young British Sculptors of the 1980s, a movement unfolding at the same time he launched El Taller de los Viernes at his home in Tlalpan. This collaborative learning workshop, which included younger artists Abraham Cruzvillegas, Gabriel Kuri, Damián Ortega and Jerónimo López (aka Dr. Lakra), became a formative space for experimentation. While Orozco acknowledges a certain philosophical and aesthetic kinship with Arte Povera—particularly in its reliance on natural forces and processes—the Italian artist he most admires is Piero Manzoni, whose highly conceptual, immaterial yet provocative approach resonates deeply with him. Some links to Manzoni can be traced in Lintels (2001), a work composed of human and animal hair residue captured by dryers and suspended from the ceiling like drying laundry or quartered skins—an unsettling, ghostly presence that Orozco first exhibited in the aftermath of 9/11. This extreme conceptual tendency toward the phenomenological minimum is even more evident in his Empty Shoe Box, which reappears in one of the galleries after its debut at the 1993 Venice Biennale as a pointed critique of the culture of spectacle, which was already beginning to infiltrate the contemporary art system at the time.
At its core, Orozco’s work is both a semiological and ontological attempt to uncover the structural logic behind the seemingly random and irrational material relations that shape our world. Yet, in the act of art-making, he sees an opportunity not only to interrogate and challenge these structures but also to propose possible meanings. “We are not capable of accepting the accident, which is another reason why we might still be too platonic in our relationship with reality,” Orozco reflects.
“This show, too, is a little bit of an accident for me because it was very much the invitation of the people,” Orozco says, acknowledging how challenging it is for him to look back at his own oeuvre. Following a major survey at Tate, which later traveled to the Centre Pompidou and MoMA, he was convinced he wouldn’t do another museum exhibition for many years. “You have to be revisiting your life and your work, while I love to keep working.” A central aspect of his practice is the relentless experimentation with everything his surrounding reality offers him. Much like artist Bosco Sodi, Orozco received an alternative education under the Montessori method—an approach he has, in many ways, transformed into the modus operandi of his practice. At its core, his work remains a direct, experiential process of learning and experimenting with the material world, engaging with the environment in both meaningful and creative ways. “I think it’s a very different way to teach how you contact reality,” he says, “and you understand the universe when you have that type of polytechnical education in terms of geometry and color and human scale.”
When asked about the role of art in his life, Orozco’s response aligns with these ideas. “I think it’s more of a relationship with the real, but I also question what is real. Art is a language. I have been able to communicate in different languages with different cultures. That’s why I’m interested in different types of art.” For him, art is a symbolic language through which humans represent, describe and shape the world around them. This approach necessarily requires a polytechnic or multi-disciplinary perspective, acknowledging the inherent plurality of reality. Unlike spoken language, where meanings are often agreed upon, art remains open to interpretation—what one person “reads” in a work may differ entirely from another’s understanding, making it a natural exercise in considering how multiple interpretations of the same phenomenon can coexist.
It is precisely this ability to embrace multiple perspectives and layers of meaning that makes Orozco the ideal figure to conceive the new master plan for Chapultepec Forest, Mexico City’s largest and most significant public park. A five-year project, the initiative has Orozco collaborating with national and international experts in environmental restoration, urban infrastructure, history, archaeology and other fields to transform the park into a Bio-Cultural Forest—enhancing accessibility while increasing biodiversity and creating new opportunities for community engagement. “It was a very unbalanced piece of land. Some of it abandoned, some of it holding our best museums. It was like Central Park in the ’70s,” Orozco says. “The main goals have been environmental restoration, architectural restoration and social restoration, in terms of accessibility and communication.”
While the Museo Jumex exhibition does not include much of this project—aside from an early drawing—the initiative is very much in progress. However, a tour organized during Mexico City Art Week with Orozco provided an opportunity to appreciate and understand some of its early achievements. By repurposing existing yet degraded elements within this historic park, Orozco has begun transforming them into a meaningful space for people to explore, experience, and engage with—an approach that reflects his broader artistic philosophy. His vision for Chapultepec acknowledges existence as a dynamic process—one shaped by an ever-shifting reality, where meaning emerges through the constant interplay of events, circumstances and the environment we inhabit.
“Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional” is on view at Museo Jumex in Mexico City through August 3, 2025.
