The complete universe of Gabriel Orozco: ‘I will never do an exhibition like this again’

At the entrance to the museum, there are two ping-pong tables assembled in the shape of an X (four separate pieces in total), with a small water garden jutting out from the central square, representing a net. It’s ready to be played on.

This is a revision of one of Gabriel Orozco’s canonical works — Ping Pong Table (1998) — that propelled him to the top of the international art scene. Almost all the elements of his universe are present in the work: geometry and nature, the manual and the mechanical, order and accident, as well as the everyday object out of place. And, above all, the work demonstrates the willingness to put materials and ideas in constant movement, with the help of anyone who wants to enter his unmoored world and start playing.

One of the most frequent phrases uttered by the 62-year-old Mexican artist is that, in the world of art, “there’s a lot of engineering.” His work often seems to need an instruction manual, as if it were a living machine that needs to be deciphered via intuition, veiled codes and sheer luck. This is how the retrospective exhibition — Gabriel Orozco, Politécnico Nacional — was conceived. It occupies all the floors (including the basement) of the Jumex Museum in Mexico City, one of the epicenters of contemporary art in Latin America. Between the beige marble walls of the museum — designed by Sir David Alan Chipperfield, recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize — a vertical display unfolds, floor by floor. It’s arranged according to the elements of nature: air, earth, water and, at the very bottom, a waste dump.

Given the clear and sober layout, visitors are able to bounce from piece to piece, as if they’re in a game of dice. They manage to come across almost all of Orozco’s emblematic works, as well as many other pieces from his personal archive that have never been exhibited before. There is, for example, the empty shoe box that revolutionized the Venice Biennale in 1993. Or the human skull (among other bones) that’s painted with black graphite squares, like a chessboard.

The Jumex exhibition — which began last Saturday — is Mexico’s artistic event of the year. Orozco hasn’t exhibited his work in a museum in almost 20 years. The event is also the largest retrospective in a career that has lasted nearly four decades. Even the exhibitions dedicated to him by various top museums — such as the MoMA in New York in 2009, the Pompidou in Paris a year later, or the Tate in London in 2011 — never managed to put together a panoramic view with such a quantity and variety of his works.

At the Jumex, there are more than 300 pieces on loan from private collections around the world, as well as from museums such as the Tate and the Pompidou. The art installation encompasses Orozco’s multidisciplinary and transversal spirit: sculpture, painting, photography, drawing, architecture, landscape and park design.

It all began with a conversation with Eugenio López Alonso, one of Mexico’s richest men and president of both the museum and the Jumex Foundation, one of the most important collections in Latin America. “We haven’t known each other for years, the museum has quite a bit of my work, and it gave me total freedom,” Orozco told EL PAÍS over the phone, on the eve of the opening. “As we were preparing it, I realized that it’s the most complete exhibition of my career. We’ve brought out material from beyond the grave. I don’t think I’ll ever do something like this again, or maybe it will happen when I’m no longer here.”

The day before the opening — during the press conference at the museum, which was packed with international media — Orozco became emotional upon remembering his beginnings. “There was a somewhat outdated debate — especially in Mexico — about whether his work could be considered art,” said Briony Fer, the British curator responsible for the exhibition, who has closely followed the artist’s steps for the last two decades. His first actions in public spaces — such as rolling a sphere of plasticine equivalent to his body weight down the street (Yielding Stone, 1992, also present in the exhibition) — weren’t very well received in his home country.

“Nobody could conceive that Mexico had anything to say when it came to contemporary art,” Orozco adds by phone. “There was a very self-absorbed scene and a view from outside that was still almost anchored in Frida Kahlo. I went to finish my studies in Europe and, in 1993, when I had my first exhibition at the MoMA in New York, people couldn’t believe it. My work reached Mexico first through newspapers and specialized magazines.”

Orozco has been a globetrotter. Last week, he received the Order of Arts and Letters — in the degree of Commander — from the French government. And each of his homes has served him as a kind of itinerant studio: he often works with the materials, esthetics and communities of each country. In France, he emptied a shark-shaped Citroen and reassembled it, turning the vehicle into a slender single-seater. In London, he invented a round billiard table and, in Amsterdam — raised up on a single wheel — he intertwined four bicycles, each facing four different directions. All of these iconic works are on display in the Jumex exhibition.

Some more ephemeral works are also included, such as the oranges that he asked the residents of the houses next to the MoMA to place in their windows, so that viewers would encounter the exhibition even after leaving the museum.

In 1999, following the same logic of placing his work in a specific place, Orozco launched a new gallery in Mexico City for local artists. His first exhibition was at a stand in a traditional food market. Over the years, the art gallery — Kurimanzutto — became the mothership of the Mexican scene and an international trendsetter, providing shelter to artists who were somewhat younger than Orozco, such as Abraham Cruzvillegas and Damián Ortega. Today, they are recognized as creative leaders, with work that falls between the genres of conceptual art and installation art.

After a residency in Tokyo, Orozco returned to Mexico a few years ago. In 2019, then-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador tasked him with the remodeling of one of the largest urban green spaces on the planet: Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park. A mammoth project, indeed. Chapultepec is twice the size of New York’s Central Park and Orozco’s budget was set at $500 million. The project still isn’t finished and has earned him a good deal of criticism.

Many critiques are collected in the basement of the Jumex, in the waste area. His team did an internet sweep of what has been said and done on the internet in relation to his work. There are jokes and memes, but also compliments and praise. The words of one British critic argue that “his work transforms the ways of producing and understanding not only culture, but the whole of reality.” On the other hand, a meme on display decries one of the works as being, simply, “a fucking empty shoebox!” This stage of the exhibit is yet another example of Orozco’s symmetrical and playful spirit.

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