Flexible Trajectories of Time and Space: Gabriel Orozco and “Chronotopic” at White Cube Bermondsey
In the hands of Gabriel Orozco, the distance between a ordinary paper tissue or toilet roll and a gold-leaf tempera surface turns porous. Across more than three decades of practice, the Mexican artist has become renowned for dismantling the everyday utility of objects, recasting them as fluid vessels of time and space. From September 16 to November 8, 2026, White Cube Bermondsey in London hosts “Chronotopic,” an ambitious survey gathering nearly 200 early and recent works by the artist.
Curated by art historian Briony Fer, the selection orchestrates a vast material vocabulary—spanning sculpture, photography, assemblage, and works on paper—into a spatial itinerary that unfolds across the gallery.
Between Everyday Rhythms and Planetary Scale
The concept of the “chronotope”—the fusion of time and space—forms the spine of the exhibition, laying bare the logic underpinning Orozco’s universe of objects, which draws sustenance from science fiction, archaeological remains, and game structures. The artist strips art of sacred or transcendent myth, pulling it toward playful experimentation. Micro-scale detritus of daily life intersects on the same plane with macro-scale models of universal geometry.
Tracing a geographic mobility across three continents, the works frame time not as an unyielding, linear progression, but as a flexible construct looping forward and backward. For Orozco, the motif of the “circle” functions less as a static compositional device than as a dynamic navigational tool that opens art onto lived reality.
From Iconic Forms to Unseen Works
The survey pairs touchstones of Orozco’s oeuvre since the early 1990s with works making their UK debut. Slid apart, stripped of its central section, and seamlessly rejoined, his sliced Citroën automobile, La DS (Cornaline) (2013), occupies a primary axis of the exhibition, evoking the silhouette of a retro spacecraft.
Alongside major pieces previously unexhibited in the UK—such as The Weight of the Sun (2003), Visible Labor (2015), and Lluvia de Aplausos (2025)—stand the artist’s latest creations, including Submarine Sunset (2026), Terracotta (2026), and Red Moon Dial (2026). Rather than offering prescriptive answers to queries like “How does time enter the artwork?” or “Can art function as a mode of time travel?”, Orozco leaves the viewer alone with the temporal weight of the objects themselves.
