Notes related to Mexico

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.

Héctor Zamora (Mexico City, Mexico, 1974) navigates between opposing concepts. His particular interest in the incessant search, or in the eagerness of understanding, for conceptual equilibrium serves as an engine for a creative explosion in the search for that fragile space that results between actions and intentions, between should and being. In Emergencia, his first solo exhibition at Madrid's Albarrán Bourdais, the Mexican artist manages to capture in several dimensions that almost obsessive vocation of his personal struggle between the opposite poles that have been shaping his proposal.

The Center for Creative Photography presents Louis Carlos Bernal: Retrospectiva, a landmark survey of one of the most significant American photographers of the twentieth century.

The Mexico Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024 proposes an immersive experience that invites the viewer to reflect on the act of migrating and its impact on identity and sense of belonging. As we marched away, we were always coming back is Erick Meyenberg's project curated by Tania Ragasol. It includes elements created in Mexico, Italy and Albania.

The Mexican Cultural Institute in Spain hosts the group exhibition En el interior del cielo, a show that gathers some of the most prestigious Mexican artists from the collection of Lorena Pérez-Jácome and Javier Lumbreras.

The exhibition Alfredo Castañeda, painter of poetry at Casa de América offers a journey through the Mexican artist's work from a more poetic point of view. In this way, Castañeda's paintings are shown accompanied by his poems, where a dialogue is generated between the artist's two vocations.

The CAC Malaga hosts Milagro, the first solo exhibition in a museum of Mario Ayala (Los Angeles, USA, 1991), son of a Mexican-American mother and Cuban immigrant father, whose production reflects his personal experiences and artistic concerns of the world of garages, truck drivers and mechanics of Fontana.

Ofrenda is the first large-scale exhibition of Mexican artist Tania Candiani in the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín. It is curated by Emiliano Valdés.

Standing before the expressive forcefulness of Mexican-American Robert Nava (East Chicago, USA, 1985) can be risky. At first glance, the primitivism in the technique used in his canvases is shocking in the conversion of the strength of the stroke and the basics of the gesture into a language that agglutinates a brute force. Perhaps for that reason, the usual tendency of those who face his work is to quickly pigeonhole it out of the academic, out of that refinement that is presupposed -although less and less- to those who fill the room of a museum, to let themselves be carried away by the urgency of expression in front of that pretended good taste.

The Philip and Muriel Berman Museum of Art presents the tour of Enrique Bostelmann: Apertures and Borderscapes. The exhibition will be available from June 18 to December 15, 2024.

Leonora Carrington’s painting "Les Distractions de Dagobert" (1945), valued between $12 to $18 million, is generating considerable excitement as it heads to auction at Sotheby's this May. Having been in an American collection since 1995, its upcoming sale not only reflects the escalating market demand for Carrington's pieces but also underscores the rising interest in female Surrealist artists.

El Museo del Barrio presented the exhibition Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory, the first retrospective exhibition by the pioneering artist, curator, and theorist. Born in 1943 to a Mexican immigrant family, Mesa-Bains has been a leading figure in Chicanx art for nearly half a century.

To Live Forever (For a While) is the exhibition at JUMEX featuring the work of iconic British artist Damien Hirst. The exhibition will offer a complete overview of the artist's work between 1986 and 2019, with 57 works including installations, sculptures and paintings.

Fuego Amigo, Pía Camil's exhibition at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil (MACG), proposes a story without beginning, in a circular form. It is curated by Mauricio Marcin.

For the second consecutive year, the Ama Amoedo Foundation and Casa Wabi Foundation in alliance launched an open call for artists from Argentina to carry out a six-week residency in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. Deadline to apply: May 2, 2024.

War and Peace: A Poetics of Gesture is the exhibition of Beatriz Gonzalez at MUAC (Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo), which reviews the artist's work. It is curated by Cuahtémoc Medina and Natalia Gutiérrez.