Category: conceptual art

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Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional

Installation view of Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional at Museo Jumex, 2025, photo by GLR Estudio, courtesy of Museo Jumex
Installation view of Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional at Museo Jumex, 2025, photo by GLR Estudio, courtesy of Museo Jumex

At the Museo Jumex in Mexico City, Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional is the first museum exhibition in Mexico in nearly 20 years for one of the country’s leading contemporary artists. The show surveys Orozco’s work from the 1990s to the present, spanning four floors and the museum’s public plaza. With more than 300 works—sculptures, installations, photographs, drawings, paintings, and games—the exhibition explores Orozco’s practice of creating an interplay between objects and concepts.

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Benoît Pype, Le Sablier Millénaire

Benoît Pype, Le Sablier Millénaire, 2021, hand blown glass and coal-tar pitch, 30 x 40 centimeters, Collection Carmignac, photo by Laurent Blevennec via Studio Benoît Pype
Benoît Pype, Le Sablier Millénaire, 2021, hand blown glass and coal-tar pitch, 30 x 40 centimeters, Collection Carmignac, photo by Laurent Blevennec via Studio Benoît Pype

In the Palais de l’Élysée, the 300-year-old palace that is the official residence and office of the president of France, a conceptual work of art by the artist Benoît Pype is a recent addition to more than 5,000 arts décoratifs, 500 works of art, and 100 clocks from the collections of the Mobilier National. In one of the 365 gilded rooms once home to Madame de Pompadour, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Charles de Gaulle before Emmanuel Macron, Pype’s Le Sablier Millénaire (Millenium Hourglass) proposes a much longer potential history.

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Maurizio Cattelan, Comedian

Maurizio Cattelan, Comedian, 2019, banana and duct tape, 7 ⅞ by 7 ⅞ by 2 inches (installation dimensions variable), image courtesy of Sotheby's
Maurizio Cattelan, Comedian, 2019, banana and duct tape, 7 ⅞ by 7 ⅞ by 2 inches (installation dimensions variable), image courtesy of Sotheby’s

At Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019, Maurizio Cattelan presented a work of art that captured public attention and has kept it, now five years later, past any expiration date. It was deceptively simple—a banana duct-taped to a wall and titled Comedian—but it was a provocation that became the subject of discussions about the value of art.

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FOR FOREST

Max Peintner, Die ungebrochene Anziehungskraft der Natur, 1970/71, pencil drawing. © Max Peintner
Max Peintner, Die ungebrochene Anziehungskraft der Natur, 1970/71, pencil drawing. © Max Peintner

In 1970, the Austrian artist and architect Max Peintner imagined a small forest contained within a stadium in a drawing titled The Unending Attraction of Nature. In it, a sprawling, smoky, industrial city has subsumed the natural world, and thousands of spectators pack the stadium to look at a few hundred trees.

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Orbital Reflector

Trevor Paglen, Nine Reconnaissance Satellites over the Sonora Pass, 2008, C-Print, 48 x 60 inches; courtesy of Trevor Paglen, Metro Pictures, New York; Altman Siegel, San Francisco; © Trevor Paglen
Trevor Paglen, Nine Reconnaissance Satellites over the Sonora Pass, 2008, C-Print, 48 x 60 inches; courtesy of Trevor Paglen, Metro Pictures, New York; Altman Siegel, San Francisco; © Trevor Paglen

At 10:34 a.m. on December 3, 2018, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Two hours later, 350 miles above Earth’s surface, it released 64 satellites into orbit for the largest satellite launch in US history. One of those, Orbital Reflector, will be the first “purely artistic” object in space.

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Lines (57° 59′N, 7° 16’W)

Pekka Niittyvirta and Timo Aho, Lines (57° 59′ N, 7° 16’W), 2018-19, Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre, image courtesy of Pekka Niittyvirta and Timo Aho
Pekka Niittyvirta and Timo Aho, Lines (57° 59′N, 7° 16’W), 2018-19, Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre, image courtesy of Pekka Niittyvirta and Timo Aho

On the island of North Uist, in the Outer Hebrides archipelago on the northwest coast of Scotland, a site-specific installation shows the impact of future climate change with a visual reference to rising sea levels.

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The Vertical Earth Kilometer

The Friedrichsplatz and Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, photo by Carroy via Wikimedia Commons
The Friedrichsplatz and Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, photo by Carroy via Wikimedia Commons

Every five years in Kassel, Germany, documenta is a contemporary art exhibition lasting 100 days. Each edition presents hundreds of works in and around the city, typically conceptual and frequently site-specific. Of the thousands of works shown since the first documenta in 1955, sixteen have become permanent installations in Kassel.

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Les Paradis, Rapport Annuel

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There are more than 800,000 companies based in the British Virgin Islands, but only 28,000 inhabitants. Image © Paolo Woods and Gabriele Galimberti

In the summer of 2016, 11.5 million documents from the world’s fourth largest offshore banking law firm were leaked by an anonymous source, exposing financial and attorney-client information of more than 214,000 offshore companies. The Panama Papers, as they are known, reveal some of the complex structures that allow the extremely wealthy to exploit offshore banking and shell corporations to commit fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, and other crimes.

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Maurizio Cattelan, Not Afraid of Love

Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled (2001), installation view at the Monnaie de Paris, 2016; photo by Zeno Zotti, courtesy Monnaie de Paris
Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2001, installation view at the Monnaie de Paris, 2016; photo by Zeno Zotti, courtesy of the Monnaie de Paris

Five years after Maurizio Cattelan announced his retirement, following a 2011 retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York, a new exhibition at the Monnaie de Paris marks his return to the art world. Not Afraid of Love includes 44 artworks installed within the Monnaie’s 18th century salons and is Cattelan’s largest exhibition in Europe to date.

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Yoko Ono: One Woman Show

Yoko Ono's advertisement published in the Village Voice, December 2, 1971; image via Artforum
Yoko Ono’s advertisement published in the Village Voice, December 2, 1971; image via Artforum

In 1971, Yoko Ono placed ads in the Village Voice and The New York Times announcing The Museum of Modern [F]art, her one-woman show at MoMA. The 100-page exhibition catalogue included an image of Yoko Ono in MoMA’s sculpture garden with a jar of flies, which were to be released into the city and then photographed as they buzzed across New York. Continue reading “Yoko Ono: One Woman Show”

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Maurizio Cattelan’s La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour)

Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960), La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour), installation view, wax, clothing, polyester resin with metallic powder, volcanic rock, carpet, glass, dimensions variable
Maurizio Cattelan, La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour), 1999; wax, clothing, polyester resin with metallic powder, volcanic rock, carpet, glass, dimensions variable; image via Christie’s

Maurizio Cattelan’s installation of La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour) is a life-sized effigy of Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteor. First exhibited in 1999 at the Kunsthalle Basel, La Nona Ora was featured at the Royal Academy in London in 2000, and also at the Zacheta Gallery of Contemporary Art in Warsaw. Christie’s sold the piece in 2001 for $886,000, and a second version was auctioned by Phillips, de Pury & Company in 2004 for $3 million.

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