Art
Natalie Stoclet
Over the past few years, Mexico City has become a powerhouse for contemporary art. In 2025, the art world’s love affair with the city shows no signs of slowing down. With the 21st edition of Zona Maco opening to the public on February 5th, the Mexican capital’s significance only grows stronger. As Latin America’s largest art fair, the annual event underscores Mexico City’s role as a global art capital, drawing collectors, curators, and artists from around the world.
In 2025, Zona Maco returns to Centro Citibanamex with 200 galleries from 29 countries across four continents, serving as the epicenter of a week filled with contemporary art. But the energy extends far beyond its halls. Outside the fair, galleries and museums across the city are rolling out some of their most significant shows of the year.
These are the nine must-see shows during Mexico City Art Week.
Travesía Cuatro
Feb. 4–Apr. 25
At Travesía Cuatro, “Tu sombra sustituida” marks Teresa Solar Abboud’s third solo show with the gallery, drawing its title from the verse of a poem by artist and poet Lucía C. Pino. Just as the poem describes a shadow morphing, Solar Abboud’s sculptures shift with the viewer, becoming something more than static objects.
Working with high-temperature clay, resin, and metal, the artist constructs forms that evoke tunnels, conduits, and passageways—symbols of movement, transformation, and resistance. Despite their monumental scale, her works invite an intuitive, physical engagement, enveloping and disrupting space.
Fresh off retrospectives at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona and Madrid’s Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Solar Abboud continues her exploration of material and perception. At once organic and mechanical, her sculptures remind us that art, like identity, is never fixed—it evolves with those who encounter it.
During Zona Maco, Mexico City tastemaker JO-HS presents “A Glass of Absinthe,” a solo exhibition by British artist Jo Dennis, curated by Elisa Carola. The show features paintings on salvaged military tent fabric, where layers of pigment, marks, and found materials accumulate like traces of memory.
Dennis’s work investigates the intersection of material culture and human experience, drawing on the Cubist and Dadaist tradition of integrating everyday objects into art. Her compositions carry the physical residue of past events—stains, imprints, and textures that speak to themes of ruination, time, and impermanence. The exhibition’s title references Pablo Picasso’s Glass of Absinthe (1914), a work that, like Dennis’s, blurs the line between object and image. Here, painting becomes an archaeological act, unearthing histories embedded in surface and structure, and transforming remnants of the past into layered, tactile meditations on presence and loss.
Saenger Galería
Through Mar. 29
Pedro Friedeberg, installation view, “simetrías y puntos de fuga — 70 años de creación” at Saenger Galería, 2025. Courtesy of Saenger Galería.
Saenger Galería kicks off the week with “simetrías y puntos de fuga — 70 años de creación,” a sweeping solo exhibition dedicated to Italian Mexican artist Pedro Friedeberg. Curated by Michel Blancsubé, the show marks seven decades of the artist’s mind-bending, meticulously detailed work, which fuses Surrealism, architecture, and obsessive patterning into a visual language entirely his own.
Friedeberg’s world is one of dizzying symmetry and impossible perspectives, where hands and feet double as ornamental structures and labyrinthine compositions invite viewers to lose themselves in the details. The exhibition showcases paintings, drawings, and sculptures like his iconic Hand Chair (ca. 1965) that exemplify his singular approach—playful yet deeply erudite, maximalist yet precise.
Presented in collaboration with Galería Casa Diana, Friedeberg’s long-standing representing gallery in the nearby city of San Miguel de Allende, the exhibition serves as both a retrospective and a testament to his enduring influence.
Proyecto H brings together four artists from its residency program for “Visual Echoes,” a group show exploring the intersections of abstraction, materiality, and perception. Featuring works by Daniel Adolfo, Álvaro Borobio, Marta Moreno, and Javier Sánchez, the exhibition highlights the dialogue between distinct artistic practices while revealing unexpected common threads.
Each artist approaches abstraction through a unique lens—whether through gestural brushwork, structural compositions, or textural experimentation. Yet their works resonate in conversation, forming a layered, dynamic exchange. More than just a showcase, “Visual Echoes” reflects the evolution of Proyecto H’s residency program, offering a glimpse into the creative processes shaped within its walls.
Galerie Nordenhake
Feb. 4–Mar. 15
Yngve Holen. Courtesy of Galerie Nordenhake.
Yngve Holen has long been preoccupied with the sleek surfaces of modern life—the parts of machines we rarely consider, but rely on daily. In his latest exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake’s Roma Norte space, the Berlin-based artist continues his practice of dismantling and reconfiguring industrial objects. His works turn headlights, medical-grade plastics, and anodized aluminum into something strangely sentient.
These sculptures don’t just reference technology; they embody it, reflecting the ways human identity is increasingly entangled with design. A car’s headlight, removed from its original context, becomes something anthropomorphic—a seeing object rather than a functional one. Elsewhere, sculptural forms suggest the clinical sterility of airports, hospitals, or assembly lines, where bodies and machines operate under the same logic.
On view from February 4th to March 15th, Holen’s work doesn’t critique technology so much as expose its quiet omnipresence, asking what happens when the objects built to serve us begin to define us instead.
Yann Gerstberger, Automatic, 2025. © the artist. Photo by Davis Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and OMR.
Yann Gerstberger, Girasoles, 2025 © the artist. Photo by Davis Gerber. Courtesy of the artist and OMR.
At OMR, Yann Gerstberger’s “2 Feet in 1 Bucket of Ice” unfolds like a fever dream—vivid, textured, and pulsating with movement. Known for his unconventional use of textile, the French-born, Mexico City–based artist builds his compositions by layering hand-dyed cotton fibers onto canvas, creating surfaces that are as tactile as they are painterly. The works nod to a range of influences, from pre-Columbian motifs to street art, psychedelic landscapes, and the erratic beauty of nature itself.
Gerstberger’s figures, animals, and abstracted forms emerge through color-saturated fields, where repetition and improvisation collide. The works suggest a folkloric narrative without ever settling into one, hovering between memory, myth, and playful absurdity. With “2 Feet in 1 Bucket of Ice,” the artist continues his exploration of craft and materiality, transforming traditional techniques into something utterly of the present.
Magali Lara’s “Robar lo que me pertenece” at Galería RGR brings together paintings, artist books, and an installation that, together, interrogate the construction of feminine intimacy. A key figure in Mexican contemporary art since the 1970s, Lara has long used language and imagery in her work to challenge the constraints imposed on female desire and self-expression. This exhibition expands on that approach, pushing beyond the personal to explore broader questions of agency, perception, and power.
Central to the show is an installation centered on the glacial landscape—a fragile, endangered space that serves as both a physical subject and a conceptual anchor. Ice, constantly shifting and disappearing, parallels the vulnerability of memory, the erosion of identity, and the instability of structures that attempt to contain feminine experience. By incorporating books as part of the exhibition, Lara invites a more interactive engagement, reinforcing the idea that narratives—both personal and collective—are never fixed, but continually rewritten.
Experimental space PEANA presents ““Their Silhouettes Bristled with Razors”,” a solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed artist Naomi Rincón Gallardo that brings her provocative, politically charged video work Eclipse (2023) to Mexico for the first time. The show immerses viewers in a mythological, multisensory universe where Indigenous futurism, queer narratives, and speculative fiction collide.
Rincón Gallardo’s practice is rooted in performance and critical theory, involving alternative histories that challenge colonial and patriarchal narratives. Eclipse unfolds through surreal, fragmented storytelling, highlighting themes of ritual, resistance, and transformation. Through saturated color, layered sound, and dreamlike imagery, the work reimagines power structures and centers voices historically pushed to the margins. Also on view is a series of graphite and watercolor works on paper that explore similar themes.
This exhibition marks a rare opportunity to experience Rincón Gallardo’s distinct visual language in Mexico City, situating her within a broader dialogue on art as a tool for cultural and political reinvention.
MASA and New York gallery Luhring Augustine continue their cross-continental dialogue with “MASA x Luhring Augustine Vol. 2,” a thoughtful pairing of contemporary art and collectible design inside MASA’s historic Mexico City space. This latest collaboration, following a similar exhibition in 2024, brings together works by Luhring Augustine artists—Eva LeWitt, Pipilotti Rist, and Diego Singh—alongside sculpture and design talents from MASA’s roster, including Alma Allen, Héctor Esrawe, and Renata Petersen.
The exhibition unfolds as a conversation between material and concept, structure and spontaneity. LeWitt’s geometric abstract sculptures resonate alongside Esrawe’s minimalist forms, while Rist’s playful visual language meets Petersen’s tactile, ceramic storytelling. Through these juxtapositions in artists’ works, “Vol. 2” becomes a study in contrasts and connections.
