GABRIEL OROZCO’S ‘Chronotopic’

GO Kyoto Chess Set, 2025

White Cube is pleased to present Gabriel Orozco’s ‘Chronotopic’ solo exhibition, in Mexico City.

16 September – 8 November 2026

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.

Submarine Sunset, 2026

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 Labor (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.

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?