NEW YORK, NY.- Opening July 8, Public Art Fund will present Gabriel Orozco: Public Nature, an exhibition of 12 new photographs on view on 300 JCDecaux bus shelters in New York City, Chicago, and Boston. The images, captured by Orozco as he walked through public spaces, explore how nature and the built environment shape one another, and together comprise the artist’s first commissioned photographic series.

Based between Mexico City, New York, Tokyo, and Paris, Orozco’s practice is shaped by the fluidity of moving across cities, an experience that informs this new body of work. Public Nature features images that offer a subtle, poetic reflection on contemporary cities as evolving environments: vines wrap around pipes, seeds are displayed in containers along the sidewalk, and plastic animals await sale in street stalls. While photography has long been central to Orozco’s practice, Public Nature represents a significant new chapter in his engagement with the medium.

“In this exhibition, Orozco uses the JCDecaux bus shelters as a framework to expand his longstanding interest in the built environment and bring it into a new register, where his images function as spatial interventions,” said Gabriela López Dena, Associate Curator of Public Practice at Public Art Fund. “The works create visual continuities between image and site, allowing elements within the photographs to appear as extensions of the surrounding urban landscape. As a result, the city itself becomes part of the work, and the work becomes part of the city.”

In the exhibition, Orozco creates unexpected encounters for viewers, with the photographs functioning as trompe l’oeil environments. Created with the scale of the bus shelters in mind, the artworks connect the surrounding city to the frame and vice versa. In one photograph, a tree grows through a concrete wall; when installed on a bus shelter, its roots might appear to extend into the sidewalk below and its branches into those of a nearby tree. “Nature” is also understood broadly: as organic matter, but also as decay, entropy, and the traces of human activity.





"When you see these images at the bus stop, you can imagine that you are physically in the landscape. It's not just about the photography itself, but the photography in relationship with the body that is looking at that image, in that bus stop, on that street. The content of the images is in relationship with the urban context around them, and the size of the image is also in relationship with the body,” said Orozco. “I like to play in this friction between the natural world and the urban. The structured grid of cities is being challenged all the time by the way nature behaves.”

Highlighting moments of friction across forms of infrastructure, the works invite viewers to pause and notice situations in which natural and urban elements intertwine in accidental ways.

Gabriel Orozco: Public Nature is curated by Public Art Fund Associate Curator of Public Practice Gabriela López Dena.