MEXICO CITY.- Museo Jumex presents Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional, the artist’s first museum exhibition in Mexico since 2006. A museum-wide survey featuring 300 objects displayed over four floors and the museum’s public plaza, the exhibition explores key themes in Orozco’s practice, showcasing how he has constantly challenged what art can be and how it is made. Politécnico Nacional shows how the artist’s multiple techniques and strategies have developed over the course of a celebrated career that began in the early 1990s.

Each floor of the exhibition activates different aspects or elements within Orozco’s practice. The order is not chronological but instead based on the artist’s interrogation of the fissure between his work and the world, questioning where one ends and the other begins.

In Orozco’s vocabulary, “constellations” refer not only to planetary or astronomical systems but also extend to groupings of material objects in time and space, including the kinds of juxtapositions and relations between things in an exhibition. In this regard, the atmosphere of Gallery 3 is filled with floating, aerated and streamlined matter. Gallery 2 two is vegetal, showcasing an entanglement of life matter, ranging from the primordial to the artifice of gardens. Gallery 1 is an aquarium but also functions as a ground of action, leading onto the dry world of the terrace that also doubles as a sculpture garden. The basement layer-1 is the compost, a composite of ideas and voices. Rather than adhering to a classical model of timeless, transcendental essences, the elements of air, earth, and water are part of a cosmology of matter and objects in Orozco’s practice, always in movement, always in circulation. The artist has created a new version of Ping Pond Table (2025) carved in stone, for the Museo Jumex Plaza. Visitors will be able to interact with the artwork, which features two ping pong tables sliced and arranged around an artificial pond. The artwork is one of many works based on games in the exhibition and exemplifies the artist’s long interest in the idea of sculpture in the public sphere.

“Gabriel Orozco is without doubt one of the leading Mexican contemporary artists who has been an equally definitive figure in international art over the past four decades,” said Eugenio López, President of Fundación Jumex. “As evidenced in this exhibition, Orozco’s creative range is extraordinary, encompassing photography of simple actions and observations in streets and markets; a modest and fragile sculpture made of onion skin; and an extensive drawing over a complete whale skeleton, to name but a few examples. Each new turn in his practice combines a playful, light touch with a profound exploration of aesthetics. His extraordinary vision is as relevant today as it was when I first encountered it.”

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 a Professor of History of Art at University College London and a 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.

“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,” said Fer. “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.”

Gabriel Orozco (Jalapa, 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.

“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,” said Museo Jumex Chief Curator Kit Hammonds. “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.”