Gabriel Orozco's Chronotopic: A Museum-Scale Show You Can Walk Into for Free

There is a particular pleasure in walking off Bermondsey Street, past the coffee queues and the antiques dealers, and into a commercial gallery that has quietly turned itself into a museum. That is what White Cube has done this autumn. Chronotopic, which opened on 16 September and runs until 8 November, gives the whole of its vast Bermondsey space to the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco. It brings together around 200 works of sculpture, painting, photography, assemblage and works on paper. Like most commercial galleries, White Cube charges nothing for entry.

For anyone new to Orozco, it is one of the best introductions to contemporary art London will offer this year.

Who is Gabriel Orozco?

Born in 1962 in Jalapa, Veracruz, Orozco came to international attention in the early 1990s with work that seemed almost too modest to count as art. At the 1993 Venice Biennale he placed an empty shoebox on the floor. He rolled a ball of plasticine the weight of his own body through the streets, letting it pick up dust and grit as it went. He photographed breath fading on a piano lid and water gathering in a puddle.

None of this was a prank. Orozco’s point was that art doesn’t need to be made of marble or hung in a gold frame. It can happen in the gap between an ordinary object and the moment someone actually looks at it. His best-known work, La DS (1993), took a Citroën DS, the elegant French saloon, cut it lengthways, removed the middle section and joined the two halves back together. The result is a car that can’t hold a driver and seems to be moving even when it stands still. A later version, La DS (Cornaline) from 2013, is the centrepiece in Bermondsey. Curators have long described it as a kind of spaceship, and once you’ve heard that it is hard to see anything else.

A travelogue through time

The show is curated by the art historian Briony Fer, who has written about Orozco for years and organised his 2025 exhibition Politécnico Nacional at Museo Jumex in Mexico City. She hasn’t arranged it as a tidy chronology. Instead she treats it as a journey through different “zones”, drawing on Orozco’s love of games, science fiction and archaeology. The title combines the Greek words for time and space, and the idea running through the rooms is that artworks are never frozen. They travel, they change context, and they build up meaning as they go.

This helps with what can otherwise feel like a bewildering range of materials. New works use tissue and toilet paper next to gold leaf and tempera, the throwaway alongside the ancient. A skull marked with graphite diamonds recalls his famous Black Kites of 1997, a real human skull drawn over with a chequerboard pattern. There are chess sets, sundial-like discs and terracottas. Several major pieces are being shown in the UK for the first time, including The Weight of the Sun (2003), Visible Labor (2015) and Lluvia de Aplausos (2025).

The motif to watch for is the circle. Orozco doesn’t use it as a pleasing shape in a composition. He treats it as a tool, almost a navigational instrument, that loops time back on itself rather than marching it forward in a straight line. Once you notice it (on a stone, in a photograph, in a painted grid), you start seeing the whole exhibition as one long conversation.

Why it matters that this is in London

The timing has several threads. The show marks twenty years since Orozco’s first exhibition with White Cube, Twelve Paintings and a Drawing, held at Mason’s Yard in 2006. It also falls in the tenth anniversary year of the Orozco Garden, his permanent commission at the South London Gallery in Peckham. It pairs nicely with a Bermondsey visit on the same afternoon.

The timing also says something about the London calendar. Frieze arrives next month, and many galleries fill the weeks around it with compact, sales-friendly displays. White Cube has gone the other way and staged something closer to a retrospective. One question critics are already asking is whether a cavernous space suits work that has always rewarded close, unhurried looking. Go and decide for yourself.

How to see it well

Give yourself at least an hour, and resist reading every label before you look. Orozco’s art depends on noticing small shifts: a line that nearly closes, a surface that has been handled, an object that is slightly wrong. Start with La DS, walk all the way round it, then let the rest of the show loosen you up.

If you’re a new collector, remember that the big mega-gallery shows are a free education as much as a shop window. You’ll come away with a sharper eye for the independent galleries nearby, many of which show younger artists working in the same spirit of everyday materials and quiet wit. Bermondsey and Peckham are well served by them, and our directory is a good place to plan the rest of your route.

Gabriel Orozco: Chronotopic is at White Cube Bermondsey, 144–152 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3TQ, until 8 November 2026. Admission free.