Gabriel Orozco returns to museums with a review of his 35 years of experience

The game and fun are inherent to the life and work of Gabriel Orozco, the most international of Mexican artists today, from whom from this February first and until August 3, a review will be presented at the Jumex Museum of his recent 35 years of work under the name of National Polytechnic.

This is the first sample of this creator in a national museum space since 2006 and the one that arrives after having coordinated from 2019 to 2024 the Chapultepec project: nature and culture, which with its 10,500 million pesos was one of the most Important public works of the previous Federal Government.

When I have fun is when things come out. There are times that it is a little boring what one does; Also, you have to be disciplined in aspects that are not so fun to do. But, in general, the best ideas come out of investigating something, a kind of curiosity that drives to think about things, and that is funsays.

From a very young age I liked football and chess, and invent games with my friends. That also happens to me in art. Sometimes, when I was beginning to paint, I was suddenly knowing how the painting had to be, and then I began to drip it and do other things; Many times I spoiled her, but in the end it is what does the most bearable and kind work.

The Veracruz Creator (Xalapa, 1962) talk with The day While last details of his exhibition on that enclosure, located in Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 303, Colonia Granada.

From a table full of varied objects, it takes two baskets full of sapporo beer corcholates, one of its favorites, and places them on a white platform of about 3 square meters.

The same will do with a collar made with snake vertebrae, transparent micas with painted geometric sketches of different colors, a plane ticket intervened with one of its drawings, a brass -scale playback of its Schwalbe motorcycle, clothing fluff recovered from a Lavandería, remains of material that he has used in his works, such as wax, and even unfinished pieces … Gabriel, you also have bones?repair one of those present when discovering a bone fragment that lies on the table. Of course I have! I am not pure feeling or spiritthe artist responds in joke, and then specify that it is the jaw of an animal.

Thus, between fun and concentrated, those objects that make up the work tables that will now present as part of the 300 works of this new exhibition are available on the platform, which come from 36 private institutions and collections of America, Europe and Asia, as well as yours.

This sample accounts for the extraordinary creative range of the creator, covering a great variety of media that include painting, sculpture, photography, drawing and installation, as well as its architectural projects and designs for gardens, parks and bridges. Among the pieces are the Empty shoe box, That both impact and controversy caused with its exhibition at the Venice Biennial in 1993, as well as the Citroën DS that cut it to make it a car, the oval pool table and a stone sculpture of a modified Pimpon table so that they can perform Two simultaneous games.

Since 1996, Gabriel Orozco performs a work table every five or 10 years, and in each one has all types of objects and materials, whether they are found, ready-made, unfinished, models or waste of some other project. The first of the two that now exhibited it throughout the first decade of this new century in New York and the other is of its recent 10 years of residence in Tokyo, Japan.

It is nice to keep these objects and then put them together. It’s like getting to a mechanical workshop and having a table with tools, nuts and screws, everything you need for the repair of one thing. A little that is the spirit of my work tables; They have been my way of operating since the first years and becoming a work (artistic) by themselves. A work table is for me as the chess board, as a board game, and the pieces are all those different elements that I have found in different partshe explains.

In National Polytechnic, Cured by the British art historian Briony Fer, key issues are explored in the practice of Orozco, who has constantly challenged what can be art and how it can be done. It also establishes a playing field to show how has developed multiple techniques and strategies throughout an important race that began in the early 1990s.

“It is a compilation, we do not call it retrospective, because it is not chronological or historical; It is divided into thematic terms.

“Due to the conditions of the museum, the curator decided to dedicate each floor (from the enclosure) to different themes. Thus (from top to bottom), one is dedicated to air or what floats; The following, to Earth, what grows in it, plants; One more, to the underwater part, where the blue whale I made in London will be after the Basque Concelos Library (Matrix Móvil), And in the last one there will be an area that we call compost, where there will be informative panels of my work, ”says the artist, who clarifies that the title of the exhibition refers to the techniques that must have been learning in the course of his life, trips and interests.

That division is not exactly the stereotype of what is in heaven, earth and the underwater world, but there are references; Because, finally, my work has touched many political-natural or ecological-economic issues in relation to its production, distribution and trainingadd.

“That is why work tables are works in process that play from the organic world to geometric, fantasy or accident and the materiality of the things we are finding.

The associations of meaning between one thing and the other are the paths that one walks and in which it generates interconnectivity between cultures, generations, signs, disciplines and techniques. That, I think, is what will make this exhibition not boring.