Gabriel Orozco: Empty Club

25 June - 28 July 1996
The Devonshire Club, 50 St James's Street, London

Photograph by Stephen White

The grand Georgian building at 50 St James's Street was first a gambling den - the home of Crockford's notorious "Temple of Chance" in the 1820s - then until the 1960s, The Devonshire Club, a domain for English gentlemen. 50 St James's lies at the heart of a certain kind of English culture, reserved and powerful. Impeccably refurbished for its new life as a corporate headquarters, 50 St. James's was in a state of waiting, suspended between an emptied-out past and an unknown future.

For his first commission in London, the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco transformed some of the silent interiors of this once animated building. Through a sequence of sculptural interventions, Orozco turned a previously private world into a public place.

The closed club became a kind of open park, an empty interior for enquiry and encounter. On several floors of the building, Orozco meditated on questions of space and time, nature and artifice and knowledge as he reshaped familiar landscapes and pastimes. Alert to the impermanence of even the most apparently stable things, Orozco is an alchemist of the everyday.

The viewer was invited to take an active role in enjoying the work, whether playing Orozco's inimitable form of billiards, relaxing in a deckchair watching bowls, or sitting in the chocolate-brown leather armchairs that evoke the smoky and exclusive world of the gentlemen's club.

Gabriel Orozco’s Empty Club was the 1996 Artangel/Beck’s Commission, part of series of collaborations between Artangel and Beck’s that began with Rachel Whiteread's House.

This project was supported by Arts Council England, Artangel International Circle, Special Angels and The Company of Angels

Funders and Collaborators