BOOK:Gabriel Orozco-Chronotopic, White Cube Books

Gabriel Orozco’s diverse practice, spanning sculpture, photography, painting, and video, explores philosophical conundrums through random encounters and spatial relationships. By utilizing everyday objects within contemporary urban environments, Orozco makes visible the poetry of chance connections, whimsy, and paradox. Working with found materials and situations such as a compressed ball of clay, a deflated football, or an abandoned kite, he alters and photographs them to create surprising and often humorous scenarios from simple, quotidian means.

By Efi Michalarou

Published on the occasion of Gabriel Orozco’s major solo exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey running from September to November 2026, the publication “Chronotopic” charts more than three decades of the artist’s expansive and experimental practice. Taking its title from the Greek words chronos for time and topos for space, the volume extends an almost twenty-five-year collaboration between Orozco and writer and curator Briony Fer. Across ninety-two individual entries, Fer engages with the speculative nature of the artist’s work, illuminating the associative and conceptual threads that define its diverse forms.

The exhibition itself takes the form of a travelogue through time and space, drawing on the artist’s interests in play and games alongside tropes from science fiction and archaeology. It journeys through different zones to explore the formal logic that holds together the astonishing range of his object-world, combining the small rhythms of the everyday with the vast scale of a planetary system. In Orozco’s hands, these extreme disparities offer material ways of thinking and making that deliberately deflate ideas of art as grandly epic or transcendental, approaching outer space in the spirit of the game rather than the gods.

The publication complements this vision with a rich selection of images that bring together works in progress, installation views, pages from Orozco’s notebooks, prototypes, and models alongside realized artworks. This documentation offers readers an immersive view into a practice animated by play and an abiding fascination with the expressive possibilities of the physical world, successfully drawing disparate disciplines like music, archaeology, science fiction, geometry, and the cosmos into a unified and imaginative relation.