ART

To Open Mexico City Art Week, Gabriel Orozco Takes Over Museo Jumex

“Politécnico Nacional,” curated by longtime Orozco scholar Briony Fer, features more than 300 artifacts and spans the entirety of the artist’s practice; just don’t call it a retrospective.

Credit (all images): Installation view of the exhibition Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional. Museo Jumex, 2025. Photo: Gerardo Landa & Eduardo López (GLR Estudio).

This week, an influx of visitors from around the world will flock to Mexico City for art and design week. Amid programming anchored by the titan fair Zona Maco, along with UDX, Material, and a constellation of gallery happenings both on and off the beaten path, Museo Jumex has made the case for taking the week with a touch of irreverent contemplation evidenced by this past weekend’s opening of “Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional.” 

Although “Politécnico Nacional” is Orozco’s first institutional exhibition in Mexico in nearly 20 years, his work has since been shown everywhere from MoMA, the Guggenheim, Tate, the Aspen Art Museum, the Kunstmuseum, Centre Pompidou—along with galleries including White Cube, Serpentine, Marianne Goodman. It begs an obvious question: what more could there be to say about his practice? As seen through the eyes of art historian, scholar, and the show’s curator Briony Fer, Museo Jumex seems to answer with “plenty.” 

At its core, the exhibition is about making the prestigious artist’s work more accessible than ever. While the whale skeleton sculpture that was his first-ever public commission, Mobile Matrix, towers above visitors to the city’s Biblioteca Vasconcelos, Museo Jumex thrusts them face to face with its counterpart in a glass-enclosed gallery that essentially functions as an aquarium. This thruline of subversion, play, and even irony is present in the exhibition’s very name, too. “Politécnico Nacional is a university that is not far from here, but this area has become very corporate, and Politécnico Nacional is a school for engineers and [was founded for] the working class,” says Orozco. “To have that term in this corporate center of Mexico is ironic, in a good way.”

The artist is a veritable polymath; with works spanning—and often combining—drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, and photography, and which are informed by the time he has spent living and working in Mexico, the United States, France, and Japan. While it would be easy, and even sensible, to categorize the 300-plus works on view accordingly, Fer delights and surprises visitors by embracing the playful rebellion that runs through Orozco’s own practice. 

The exhibition is staged across the entirety of the museum’s three galleries and terrace level, and avoids ascribing hierarchy to period, medium, or geography. Instead, it allows visitors to discover two core tenets of Orozco’s work: the técnicas of rotation, symmetry, and fabrication that present across his practice, and games and gambits he uses to interrogate commodity. This, after all, is the artist who remakes an organic work of sculpture that consists of an onion skin, each time it is exhibited. His Empty Shoe Box predates Maurizo Cattelan’s Comedian by more than three decades, and, at Museo Jumex, is displayed near a hanging sculpture made from clothesdrier lint—human hair and all.

“For an artist to make this kind of show can be very heavy,” Orozco explained at a preview of the exhibition, last week. “You have to go into your archives and become your own historian.” Walking through the show, one comes away with the sense that such heaviness would have killed its potential to inspire—a potential that is realized through the institutional pairing of Fer and the artist. But, Orozco said, “It was always fun.”

“In a way, there’s a deliberate friction between that idea of the technical precision and the idea of something more fluid, and certainly that carries through in the work,” says Fer. The show’s brilliance lies in her ability to help audiences see the eternal gambit at work in Orozco’s practice, too. 

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