Gabriel Orozco
By Briony Fer
About the exhibition
Bringing together approximately 200 new and existing works spanning sculpture, painting, photography, assemblage and works on paper, Gabriel Orozco’s ‘Chronotopic’ is curated by art historian Briony Fer, who has written extensively on the artist. In 2025 Fer curated Orozco’s major Museo Jumex exhibition ‘Politécnico Nacional’ in Mexico City.
Chronotopic An Essay by Bryony Fer
CHRONOS (TIME) + TOPOS (SPACE) = CHRONOTOPE
Gabriel Orozco’s new exhibition takes the form of a travelogue through time and space. Drawing on the artist’s interests in play and games as well as tropes from sci-fi and archaeology, the show travels through different zones to explore the formal logic that holds together the astonishing range of his object-world.
‘Chronotopic’ combines the small rhythms of the everyday with the vast scale of a planetary system, the material stuff of life with ideas of geometry and the universe. In Orozco’s hands, these disparities – which can be extreme and even absurd – offer material ways of thinking and making that deflate ideas of Art as grandly epic or transcendental. If he’s always been fascinated with outer space, it’s in the spirit of the game rather than the gods.
A new body of work continues Orozco’s longstanding investigations into relations between science and fiction, accident and geometry, materiality and poetry, time and the untimely. Working with materials as disposable as tissue and toilet paper and as historical as gold leaf and tempera, the work runs the gamut of different geographies and cultural systems. Following a trajectory that crosses three continents, the exhibition explores how part of the work of art is to move through different contexts and circumstances; how ideas as well as artworks are always mobile and never static, constantly making new connections and transforming over time in the process.
The exhibition includes seminal works like La DS (Cornaline) (2013), a spliced Citroën car which has often been thought of as a kind of spaceship, as well as major pieces that have never been shown in the UK before, such as The Weight of the Sun (2003), Visible Labour (2015), and Lluvia de Aplausos (2025). These are shown alongside many works spanning his entire career, beginning in the early 1990s when he first emerged as a major international artist.
Orozco has always thought of the circle as an instrument or device to work with, as opposed to a static form in an artistic composition. It has evolved in his work as a temporal and spatial tool – like a navigational instrument that he uses to open art to the reality out of which it is ultimately made. The circle has proved remarkably elastic over the last several decades and endlessly adaptable. Rather than thinking about time in terms of a linear progression, always marching inexorably on, cyclical models of time tend to loop backwards and forward, crossing cultures across the world. Like memory, or like sci-fi, this plays havoc with timekeeping. Seen through this chronotopic lens, Orozco’s work presents a series of questions rather than definitive answers and solutions: How does time enter the artwork? Can art be a form of time-travel? Why are we so invested in the idea that art is beyond time and timeless, when maybe the problem is it’s just too full of time?
