Why Gabriel Orozco’s Mexico City Retrospective Is a Time-Traveling Delight

What does a retrospective accomplish? A major show on Gabriel Orozco in Mexico City offers a new idea.

From an academic standpoint, an institutional retrospective exhibition is seen as a crowning jewel of an artist’s career, the culmination of a lifetime’s worth of work and oeuvre that has had an outsized influence on the state of artmaking. Typically, retrospectives are staged roughly, if not precisely, chronologically, showing how the artist started in one place and—traced through subsequent periods and bodies of work—ended up in another. A nice tidy package.

But what if another, more valuable function could be found within the retrospective format? On view through August 3, 2025, Gabriel Orozco’s career-spanning exhibition at the Museo Jumex, “Politécnico Nacional,” all but abandons traditional considerations around what a retrospective can or should be. Instead, the retrospective is approached less as a case study of an artist and more as an open field of exploration, one where time, context, and medium are not presented hierarchically, but as entry points to the core tenants and recurring lines of inquiry of the artist’s practice.

The exhibition is curated by University College London Professor and Fellow of the British Academy Briony Fer, who has been a leading scholar on Orozco for more than two decades (she also curated a show of his work at White Cube Hong Kong in 2016). The artist and curator’s longstanding working relationship undoubtedly led to the ability for a more experimentally organized show. “This is an artist who is very open and has been very open to intellectual dialogue as well as to conversation and argument, that’s been very generative to me,” said Fer in an interview.

The show comprises 300 objects (more if you consider that some works include dozens of objects themselves) installed across four floors plus the public plaza and terraces. A proverbial homecoming for the artist, the exhibition marks Orozco’s first major museum show in Mexico since 2006 (in an opening talk, he was quick to point out that though he hasn’t had a project of this scale in Mexico for some time, he has always maintained a presence in the country, continually returning from his forays around the world).

Orozco’s role in facilitating Mexico’s recognition as an international powerhouse of contemporary art cannot be understated. In the early 1990s when Orozco was first rising to fame, Mexico was still best known for its advancements in Modernism, à la Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, or José Clemente Orozco (unrelated to Gabriel). Early works like (1993), made from a Citroën DS car cut lengthwise and reassembled to be surreally slim, and (1993), became exemplary of his practice, which centers on locating the fractures and intersections between art and everyday life.

It is this specific element of Orozco’s artistic focus that underpins the present exhibition at Museo Jumex, where works from across his career comingle and are instead loosely organized on an elemental basis, or as Orozco refers to them, “constellations.” The top floor of the show brings together atmospheric, airy works, including ceiling fans with streams of toilet paper hanging from their blades (emblematic of Orozco’s wry sense of humor), and the floor below presents bodies of work with a decidedly earthy, vegetal sensibility. In the first-floor gallery are aquatic works, including one of his iconic whale skeletons (another of which, [2006] hangs at the Biblioteca Vasconcelos across town). And the museum’s basement level is the “compost,” reflecting a buildup of ideas, voices, and overlapping media. The star of this lower level is a video work that mimics the format and style of viral videos on TikTok.

Despite the show’s massive size, parsing through decades of Orozco’s work was no small feat, involving going back into the artist’s archives and meticulously tracing the elemental aspects of various works from across decades.

“The only thing that I was not so sure about is that there were so many works, because you know I have worked a lot, and I have done a lot of different things,” Orozco said. “But [Fer] was just ‘yes, and this and then this and then this and that. And then we combine this with that.’ All the dynamics of co-relationships and putting so much research into finding pieces … The museum wanted to have a really ambitious show, and a very complete show. It was the one thing that I was a bit worried about. But she was so happy choosing works. I can see that she really likes my work. I think maybe she likes it even more than me,” he added wryly.

Dotted throughout the show are some of Orozco’s most recognizable works, such as his “Samurai Tree Paintings” (2004), geometric abstractions with circular, diagrammatic designs that recall compositions he had toyed with years earlier on everything from graph paper to airplane tickets. These are juxtaposed with pieces such as (2006) illustrating how the inspiration behind the works lives on, ever-evolving, ever-adapting. Examples of his large-scale “Working Tables,” like (2015–2023) bring to life the intimate details of his process, displaying collections of various found and made objects, scraps of materials, partial works, and sketches, conceptually held together by the artist’s pursuit of finding the connections between things.

In the museum courtyard, (1998), a four-player construction of a ping pong table playable by visitors, has been reproduced with native water-based plats at its center, alluding to Orozco’s interest in games and penchant for the playful and humorous. Adapted from its original installation featuring lily pads, the work conveys a message that is perhaps even more potent today than at the time of its creation.

Art history, like much of the humanities, bears an impulse to categorize, codify, define, and place things (artworks, artists, periods of time, etc.) in little boxes. In “Politécnico Nacional,” Orozco and Fer resist such inclinations and instead consider the oeuvre holistically. In turn, the show can be understood more as a practice-based framework or roadmap from which visitors can freely explore the tactics and methodologies of the works—and how the implication of each has changed or stayed the same in the time since it was made.

“It changes the way I think about art history,” reflected Fer on the show. “For years I’ve been very dubious about the art historical construction that the meaning of the work is constructed when it’s produced…And everything about this work defies that. That sense of how meaning transforms, and I got very interested in temporality and time. I even in [the exhibition catalogue] called one of his techniques not a conventional technique, but time and temporalities … in the sense that everything is always in the process of changing through time.”

The exhibition’s installation underscores chronology’s backseat role. Across the floors, works from across the periods and places of Orozco’s career comingle, offering new insight into the heart of his practice.

At the extreme, on the top floor, a recent work, (2023) is hung on the wall beside the artist’s personal suitcase, replete with luggage tags and worn-off labels, which Orozco placed there on one of his last walkthroughs before opening. Brought on his most recent trip to Mexico City, and placed specifically next to this work (which references ancient Mexican imagery and symbolism), the addition reflects the continuing inspiration for new work inspired by way of revisiting another within the context of the exhibition.

“Both works are our cultural baggage because we do carry a lot of luggage and we need to know when to leave,” Orozco explained. Incongruities balanced by unseen connections in the world around us are a cornerstone of the artist’s work and the addition speaks to how this process of sousing out these intersections in his work—both old and new—is ongoing. No work is inherently fossilized within the time and place it was created.

The show’s title speaks to this egalitarian sensibility. Orozco took inspiration from the nearby Instituto Politécnico Nacional, and more broadly polytechnic education, which is geared toward applied sciences like engineering, but notably has no courses on art. For Orozco, this is a shortcoming, as shown in much of his work there are significant intersections between artmaking, engineering, music, computer technology, history, and so on.

In the context of the present exhibition, the retrospective format by way of Orozco’s practice itself is transformed into a type of school, one that forefronts accessibility, malleability, and a hope to inspire rather than indoctrinate in a particular pedagogy or canon. In the same way, an artist or art historian might have one takeaway from the exhibition, and an engineering student or architect might have another. Its aims are generative, rather than purely reflective.

Speaking on the show overall, Fer said, “It’s for a wide audience but never underestimate them. Never patronize them. And in a way, there are very specialist audiences and then there is this very wide public and some of that public is not knowledgeable about art, but if you make a good enough show, it will work for those different audiences.”

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com