Gabriel Orozco Public Nature

JCDecaux Bus Shelters in New York City, Chicago, and Boston

Opens July 8

About the Exhibition

Public Nature is Gabriel Orozco’s first commissioned photographic series and his first large-scale public art project in the United States. The exhibition explores the relationship between nature and the built environment—not as opposites, but as systems continually shaping one another. Vines wrapped around pipes, landscapes formed by piles of dirt and trash, and street stalls filled with plastic animals appear in compositions that highlight moments of friction across forms of infrastructure. Known for his attention to overlooked details of daily life and for working beyond the confines of the studio, Orozco (b. 1962, Xalapa, Mexico) captured these images while walking through public spaces.

Installed on 300 JCDecaux bus shelters across New York City, Chicago, and Boston, the 12 photographs function as trompe l’oeil interventions, dissolving the boundary between image and site. They extend the surrounding city into the frame and vice versa, creating perceptual loops that shift as the viewer moves. In one photograph, a tree grows through a concrete wall; when installed on a bus shelter, its roots might appear to extend into the sidewalk below and its branches into those of a nearby tree. In this way, Orozco uses images as sculptural material to reconfigure the spatial experience of the city.

The works invite viewers to notice situations in which natural and urban elements intertwine in accidental ways. Rather than presenting them as isolated oddities, Orozco suggests that they emerge from conditions that recur throughout the world. For him, “nature” is understood broadly: as organic matter, but also as decay, entropy, and the traces of human activity. The term also prompts questions about what constitutes the essence of public space and how it is defined through adaptation, accumulation, and time. Orozco’s images offer a subtle, poetic reflection on contemporary cities as shared and evolving environments.

Gabriel Orozco: Public Nature is curated by Public Art Fund Associate Curator of Public Practice Gabriela López Dena.

About the Artist

Gabriel Orozco View Profile

Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962, Xalapa, Mexico) is one of the most influential artists of his generation, with a practice that moves fluidly through sculpture, photography, drawing, painting, and installation. His best-known works include drawings on airline boarding passes, a modified Citroën automobile (La DS, 1993), and a whale skeleton covered in graphite patterns (Mobile Matrix, 2006). Across media and scale, Orozco often reconfigures existing objects, situations, and environments, revealing unexpected possibilities within them.

Public space has long been central to Orozco’s practice, serving as both a site of observation and a medium for artistic intervention. Over the past decade, he has expanded this engagement through a series of large-scale landscape projects: a permanent garden for the South London Gallery (2016), the cultural master plan for Chapultepec Park in Mexico City (2019–present), and a site-specific garden commission for the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul (2026).

Orozco has presented major exhibitions at leading institutions worldwide, among them The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009); Kunstmuseum Basel (2010); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010); Tate Modern, London (2011); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2012); Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2015); The Noguchi Museum, New York (2019); and Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2025). His work has been the subject of more than 25 monographs.

Photo credit: Ana Hop

Bloomberg Philanthropies is the presenting sponsor of Gabriel Orozco: Public Nature.

Leadership support for Gabriel Orozco: Public Nature is provided by the Abrams Foundation, Elizabeth Fearon Pepperman & Richard C. Pepperman II, and Jennifer Harris, with champion support from Andrea Krantz & Harvey M. Sawikin and Holly & Jonathan Lipton, and major support from the Mexican Cultural Institute and the Consulate General of Mexico.

Special thanks to JCDecaux.

Public Art Fund is supported by the generosity of individuals, corporations, and private foundations including lead support from Bloomberg Philanthropies, along with major support from the Abrams Foundation, the Charina Endowment Fund, The Cowles Charitable Trust, the Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Ford Foundation, The Fuhrman Family Foundation, Kenneth C. Griffin and Griffin Catalyst, Agnes Gund, The Marc Haas Foundation, Hartfield Foundation, KHR McNeely Family Foundation | Kevin, Rosemary, and Hannah Rose McNeely, the Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust, Red Crane Foundation, the Meyer and Deanne Sharlin Foundation, and The Silverweed Foundation.

Public Art Fund exhibitions and programs are also supported in part with public funds from government agencies, including the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.