Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
Back in February, much of the art world migrated to Mexico, where the weather was better and there was the most art to be seen by quantity. I arrived in Mexico City the week before the opening of the big fair Zona Maco and the leading satellite fair Material. But everyone I met there told me that, in fact, I was late. The real professionals had arrived in Mexico a week before me for Guadalajara Art Weekend. I assured them all that next year I would do it all properly, and that if anyone else wanted to join me farther west even earlier, we could all go scuba diving in Baja California, in January.
I was, however, there in time to see “Politécnico Nacional,” the survey by artist Gabriel Orozco that had just opened at Museo Jumex. Orozco (b. 1962) is certainly one of the country’s most famous artists, yet the show represents his first museum show in Mexico since 2006. As if to make up for lost time, the show is remarkably authoritative, with 300 objects displayed over four floors; the press preview in February was packed with television reporters for this major event.
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What’s charming about Orozco in the face of all this ceremony is the simple nature of the work itself. You could accuse his art of being flippant or ironic, but in fact it is discreet. One of the bigger works on the top floor is La DS (Cornaline) (2013), first shown at Marian Goodman in 1994. This Citroën sports car has been cut lengthwise, then had the middle removed, before the right side and left side were fused together. The end result looks like a torpedo—playing into Orozco’s beloved aesthetics associated with travel and roundedness—but what is most remarkable about it is that it looks like it rolled off the assembly line that way.
I thought about this car recently in the excellent Robert Grosvenor show at Paula Cooper. His mutant vehicles are proudly wrong. Orozco makes the strange feel so natural. Because it is. One of his best-known pieces, Empty Shoe Box (1993), is a comfort in the futuristic space of Jumex, as it must have been when it first appeared during the grandiosity of the Venice Biennale.
Whale skeletons, airplane tickets, and photos of soccer games. You can never guess where Orozco, throughout his career, will next map his signature geographic designs. His Working tables (2015-2023, in this show) are instructive in where his thinking begins. The one I hovered over seemed to have been assembled in Japan. It contained small plastic robot toys and receipts onto which the artist had printed circles. There were tapestries from which he had removed a circle. There were boomerangs, yogurt and a paper coaster that said, “SO TIRED.” Like the rest of the show, it was like looking at a map that tried to describe the strange territory of the artist’s mind.
“Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional” is on view at the Museo Jumex through August 3, 2025.
