Notes related to Mexico

The Casa de México Foundation in Spain is hosting, through the second week of June, a must-see exhibition from the Jumex Collection—one of the most significant contemporary art collections in Latin America. Titled Éramos felices y no lo sabíamos (We Were Happy and Didn't Know It), the exhibition revisits the vibrant artistic scene of 1990s Mexico, offering a re-reading of one of the most dynamic periods in the country’s contemporary art history.

The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) presents Magali Lara: Stitched to the Body, an exhibition that examines a key moment in the career of pioneering Mexican artist.

Through the idea of an endless spiral, this exhibition at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) unfolds as a reverse retrospective of artist Magali Lara (Mexico City, 1956), beginning with two murals created especially for the show and tracing back to her earliest drawings from the 1980s and 1970s.

The Cultural Institute of Mexico in Spain hosts the exhibition Estrategias de recuperación (Recovery Strategies), featuring three recent projects by the photographer. Including the series Las flores mueren dos veces (Flowers Die Twice, 2021–2024), Palimpsesto (2024–2025), and Maíz (Corn) (2023–present), the Mexican photographer explores the elements and causes that create distortion and fragmentation in memory.

The exhibition brings together a group of eight artists whose work, though diverse in technique and approach, shares a common concern for social justice and historical memory.

Mexico has emerged as a significant contemporary art hub on the international stage. Since the inception of Zona Maco, Mexico City has become a key destination for cultural pilgrims, marking the start of the global art fair calendar.

Marres, House for Contemporary Culture, will present on March 15 the exhibition Vultures & Fireflies by Alejandro Galván; this is a painted chronicle of Mexico from the perspective of one of the largest working-class suburbs.

Located in KM 113 of the federal highway that connects Salina Cruz to Pinotepa Nacional, a remote creative jewel stands. Architecture, design, and art cohabit along this section of the Oaxacan coast. A mix of boutique accommodations, gastronomy, and contemporary art proposals enrich Puerto Escondido’s endowment of inspiration and creation.

The Mexican art scene is going through an exceptional moment. There is a palpable energy, with new galleries opening, others already consolidated in the process of expansion and Mexican artists and curators gaining more and more international visibility. Their presence in museums, biennials and global fairs continues to grow, consolidating Mexico as a key player in the contemporary art scene.

In her work, using traditional techniques such as oil painting, she explores contemporary imaginaries with a reflective approach to the relationship between memory, the body, image, and identity.

Paths of Life invites viewers on a journey through 45 years of the Mexican photographer's distinguished photographic career; the exhibition presents a captivating combination of previously unpublished images from the artist's personal archive along with her most recent works.

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University presents Rubén Ortiz-Torres: Zonas de Colaboración, the artist’s first major solo exhibition in New York, curated by Betti-Sue Hertz.

The Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) presents the work of French artist Kader Attia: A Descent into Paradise.

Gabriel O'Shea (Metepec, Mexico, 1998) manages to delve into that huge and apparent dichotomy between the technological and the human (or the future and the real) in his most recent proposal at Hilario Galguera's Madrid headquarters, a series of paintings of high conceptual content that critically debate on several technical and thinking aspects.

From February 1 to August 3, 2025, Museo Jumex presents Gabriel Orozco: Politécnico Nacional (Gabriel Orozco: National Polytechnic), the artist's first museum exhibition in Mexico since 2006; this survey explores key themes in the practice of the Mexican artist, who has constantly challenged what art can be and how it can be made. 

The Met’s bold new vision for the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing –to be opened at 2030, presenting Modern and Contemporary art– is designed by Mexican architect Frida Escobedo, the first woman to design a new wing in the Museum’s 154-year history.

The Pinta Miami 2024 edition -from December 5 to 8- presents proposals that enhance the Latin American gene. Arte al Día highlights four galleries from four Latin American countries: Petrus Gallery in Puerto Rico, Proyecto H in Spain and Mexico, Salar Gallery in Bolivia and Judas Gallery in Chile.

The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University announces Leonora Carrington: Dream Weaver, the new exhibition opening on January 22, 2025. The exhibition, curated by Dr. Gannit Ankori, Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator, will feature over 30 of Carrington’s spellbinding artworks, loaned from private collections, which have rarely been on public display.

Fundación Casa de Mexico in Spain hosts the exhibition Modern Art of Mexico, with funds from the Blaisten Collection and curated by Daniel Garza Usabiaga, which takes an interesting look at the country's 20th century production through the eyes of Margarita Nelken (Madrid, Spain, 1894-Mexico City, Mexico, 1968).

Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) presents Coordenadas claras para nuestra confusión (Clear coordinates for our confusion), by artist Julieta Aranda. This exhibition proposes to review the artist's production of the last decades from the perspective of her collaboration with time, understood not only as an object of research but also as an autonomous and active interlocutor. It is curated by Alejandra Labastida.

The Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales in Montevideo, Uruguay, presents the work of Mexican artist Adela Casacuberta. It is a site-specific installation Pink mushrooms in the museum's gardens and an exhibition of her most recent works.

The section dedicated to abstraction in the Strangers Everywhere / Stranieri Ouvunque exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2024 explores how artists from the Global South -particularly those from Latin America- pursued less rigorous forms, undulating lines and a vibrant color palette stemming from references of their own.

Liberty & Security is the exhibition at Jumex by Débora Delmar (Mexico 1986) in which she delves into the effects of globalization on everyday life, based on a critique of privatization and the homogenization of public space. The artist investigates the physical and symbolic impacts of architecture present in gentrification, consumism and surveillance in the urban environment.

In an art industry that increasingly advocates following the lines established by cultural policies, it is always comforting to return to thesis themes, to environments that draw from social and historiographic sources, of course, but also from myths and a well-understood anthropology. You can go deeper in subtitles and lines or you can put together a skeleton, but the overview can also be a reward these days.

Siluetas sobre maleza [Silhouettes on grass] is a group exhibition at Museo Jumex that explores the ways in which bodies exist and inhabit territory. Spanning several generations, the exhibition features artists who explore the intertwined associations of body, land and identity in Latin America's history and present: Minia Biabiany (Guadalupe, 1988), Vivian Caccuri (Brazil, 1986), Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (Mexico, 1988), Ana Mendieta (Cuba, 1948 - USA, 1985), Nohemí Pérez (Colombia, 1962) and Vivian Suter (Argentina, 1949).

Travesía Cuatro hosts at its Madrid headquarters Surf and Turf, the fifth exhibition that the gallery dedicates to Milena Múzquiz (Tijuana, Mexico, 1972), that gathers, with about thirty works, the continuity of the production that began after the aesthetic and technical change produced by the end of Los Súper Elegantes, a musical group that he shared with the Argentine Martiniano López Crozet, and which represented a platform that brought together his purest expression through voice and body, as well as with the aesthetic possibilities of costumes and image.

Rutas relacionales (Relational Routes) is the long-term collective with which the Lucía Mendoza gallery celebrates its tenth anniversary and with which it intends to raise awareness, through the work of about 40 artists, about several of the current thematic and philosophical axes, those that trace their need from the relationship of mankind with its environment. In these axes, we find lines of argument that deal with ecology, society and economies, passing through everything that composes them, such as political processes or the construction of identity. 

Casa de América is hosting three interconnected exhibitions in Madrid until November 30 that investigate and show the influence of the arts and the roots of pre-Columbian cultures in contemporary art and architecture. 

Stefan Brüggemann (Mexico City, Mexico, 1975) disembarks at Casa de México with Dos líneas (fe), a series that is understood as an installation and that starts from the impact and the apparent simplicity exposed to develop the concept of inheritance and its satellites. The Mexican conceptual artist uses the power reflected by symbols, religion and history, an element that he deploys, sometimes explicitly, in his large-format works.

The two venues of MEMORIA gallery enter into a necessary dialogue by hosting the individual but connected exhibitions of Gustavo Pérez (Mexico City, Mexico, 1950) and Lin Calle (Hubei, China, 1994), who put on the table, from their techniques and perspectives, a debate of thought on the impoverishment and extinction of contemporary imaginaries.