ART CITIES:Mexico City-Gabriel Orozco

Gabriel Orozco proposes a game where logos and the rules of the market are set against each other, as two forms of understanding an ever-growing capitalist world in the midst of collapse, the art market and the market of household appliances in a supermarket within an art gallery. In a full-scale association of functional operations, kurimanzutto gallery opened an OXXO, the most wide-spread convenience store in Mexico, which operates for 30 working days.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: kurimanzutto Archive

The art market for both historical and contemporary works has rapidly grown, and artists and their images, within their respective production and reproduction systems, have suffered profound transformations in recent years. Upon entering the kurimanzutto gallery, visitors are given an “Oroxxo” dollar, a fake bill that is a collage of U.S. and Mexican money and bears a geometric pattern devised by Orozco. These can then be exchanged for goods inside the shop. What the “Oroxxo” dollar won’t buy is one of the roughly 300 objects inside the shop that the artist has altered with circular stickers, in ways that echo the geometric patterns of his abstract paintings. These objects, are sold as Orozco’s art and prices for them will fluctuate depending on supply and demand over the course of the exhibition Orozco’s supermarket shows how powerfully human subjects are oriented by nonhuman objects, with the shelves representing the physical infrastructural conditions of possibility for subjectivity and sociality. In this one-of-a-kind association, unique in its scale, the entities put forth by Orozco operates in their double identity and functionality, inviting a game of icons in which both universes participate, the world of everyday goods and the art world. The 300 products selected, ranging from soda and beer to chips, canned food, candy, juice, liquor bottles candles and condoms, are on sale as individual series of 10 pieces each, exponentially reducing the price by each unit, for a maximum total of 3,000 works that will be produced only once they are acquired by the consumer and collector.

*OXXO, is a chain of convenience stores in Mexico, opened its first store in 1978 in Monterrey. Today it has over 14,000 stores and it is the largest of its kind in Mexico. Over ten million customers are served every day; 104,000 people are employed and 1,208 new stores were opened last year alone.

Info: kurimanzutto gallery, Gobernador Rafael Rebollar 94, San Miguel, Chapultepec, Mexico City, Duration: 8/2-16/3/17, Mon-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.kurimanzutto.com