“Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional” was organized by the artist in close collaboration with curator Briony Fer. GERARDO LANDA ROJANO

One of the standout highlights of this year’s Mexico City Art Week was internationally acclaimed artist Gabriel Orozco’s first career survey in decades in his home country. Titled “Politécnico Nacional,” the Museo Jumex exhibition underscores Orozco’s relentless anthropological and psychological exploration of the material realm, questioning the very structure of reality and the role of human creation within the perpetual flow of particles and the cosmic cycles of transformation. The artist has spent his career identifying, capturing or orchestrating moments where a mysterious order and universal harmony emerge—creating new relationships, correspondences and symmetries between things. Tracking possible mathematical and geometric relationships like a contemporary Pythagoras, Orozco’s practice seems guided by a desire to reveal the underlying harmony of existence through recurring numerical and formal patterns.

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As the title suggests, the show positions Orozco as a kind of form engineer, assembling compositions where objects serve as both code and critique, revealing the political, economic and anthropological meanings embedded within their production, circulation and destruction. This framework might seem unusual for an artist trained at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, UNAM (1981-1984), a program more aligned with the humanities and social sciences, yet his travels and his endless observation of the human world have allowed him to develop a diverse range of techniques and approaches. “After the years of making my own technique on the road and unlearning so many things I learned in the academy, traveling between cultures and living in London, Paris, New York and now in Tokyo, I think one of my main reasons to be traveling has been looking for always new things to investigate,” he tells Observer. “That’s why sometimes it’s disconcerting how I change, or I have in different projects at the same time different scales and aesthetics.”

Rather than resisting this fundamental principle, Orozco embraces it. His art is coherently eclectic, taking form across mediums and styles with an extreme sense of freedom and playfulness. He constructs new constellations of meaning using a wildly diverse array of materials, objects and techniques, where organic and synthetic processes intertwine and integrate seamlessly. Orozco suggests this is why his work never feels repetitive, corporate, mass-produced or fabricated and instead remains playful, adaptive and endlessly resourceful. Though his practice spans........

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