At Mexico City’s Material and Salón Acme fairs, artists go out on a limb – The Art Newspaper

The 2 foremost satellite tv for pc festivals of Mexico Metropolis’s Artwork Week—Salón Acme and Materials, now of their twelfth and eleventh editions, respectively—drew massive crowds to their openings a number of blocks aside the day after Zona Maco held its VIP preview. At Expo Reforma, the venue for Materials and the upstart design honest Distinctive Design X, guests stuffed the aisles and customary areas on Thursday (6 February). The 72 exhibitors at Materials, hailing from 20 international locations, embody a robust contingent of galleries from Mexico, Peru, Argentina and Colombia.

“This yr is the very best share so far of galleries taking part from Latin America,” says Brett W. Schultz, the honest’s co-founder. “It’s essential that Materials be a viable platform for galleries from Buenos Aires, Santiago, Lima, and so on. And a whole lot of the taking part galleries from the UK and US are exhibiting artists who’re from Latin America, have Latin American heritage or are based mostly right here.”

New York-based Swivel Gallery, as an illustration, has a solo stand of works by the Cuban American artist Amy Bravo, whose mixed-media sculptures are intensely private but have a robust materials pull with their mixtures of wax, bones, textiles, discovered objects and extra. Many works incorporate casts of the artist’s personal face, in addition to model limbs and creature imagery like spiders and bulls. The stand’s centrepiece, a human determine on palms and knees, embedded with imagery and topped with a bull cranium, offered for $14,000 earlier than the top of the opening day, whereas smaller wall-based works can be found for $7,500.

“Her work is about her household and her heritage,” says Aida Valdez, a Mexico Metropolis-based artwork adviser engaged on the Swivel stand. “She makes use of a whole lot of symbolism in her work—the bull represents her father, and she or he is the spider. The work can be a little bit of a insurrection in opposition to macho tradition—she’s making very muscular sculptures.”

Muscle tissues, bones, tendons and limbs of varied types are surprisingly frequent options throughout the satellite tv for pc festivals. Within the subsequent aisle over from the Swivel Gallery sales space, the Mexico Metropolis-based gallery Pequod Co’s stand consists of inside its group presentation a sculpture by the Tijuana-born artist Andrew Roberts that consists of a hyperrealistic severed zombie leg lined in cuts and tattoos, introduced in a high-end, padded carrying case. The work, Remake, reshoot, reprise: a ghoul needed to pay its debt to the solar (2024), is priced at $8,000 and incorporates medical-grade silicone and builds on the artist’s work with cinematic and videogame software program.

“His work is coping with the normalisation of violence and fixed migration throughout the Mexico-US border the place he’s from in Tijuana,” says the gallery’s co-founder and co-director Mau Galguera. “Andrew is at all times exploring the concept of otherness, and the way when the opposite is just not understood it turns into feared.”

One other severed limb emblematic of worry and otherness—additionally of Tijuanan origin—is on view in Materials’s Proyectos sector, which supplies small stands freed from cost to experimental and artist-run areas, in addition to the mentorship of extra established sellers. The artwork house Sala de Espera has partially recreated its house base in Tijuana, which is inside an deserted unlawful hospital, full with fake wooden panelling and a trio of garish ready room seats. On the center seat sits Talia Pérez Gilbert’s sculpture of a furry, disembodied hand, Abominable Enter Infernal (2025), which is priced at $1,000. Fabricated from wax, acrylic, hair, cloth and a cufflink, it’s based mostly on an city legend a couple of malevolent bushy hand, la mano peluda, and a preferred radio present of the identical title the place folks name in to share horror tales.

“The set up known as Religion, Hope and Fraud, and it’s based mostly on the headline of a Los Angeles Occasions article from 1991 in regards to the physician who ran the clandestine hospital the place we’re based mostly, Jimmy Keller,” explains Luis Alonso Sánchez, who co-directs Sala de Espera with Gilbert. The stand additionally consists of an appropriately scary sculpture of a screaming, Munchian determine by Luis Alonso Sánchez, a reinterpretation of a pornographic collage discovered at an underground bar contained in the deserted hospital, by Gabriel Boils Terán, and a collection of works on paper by all three featured artists, priced between $100 and $200.

Sánchez provides: “We at all times speak about how Tijuana has no historical past, so we’re making an attempt to commemorate its previous on this present second of chaos and nervousness on the border.”

The stand of the Mexico Metropolis-based gallery Lodos consists of two sculptures by Berenice Olmedo, who salvages and reconfigures prosthetic limbs to create freestanding figures which can be without delay otherworldly and distinctly human. The shorter work, that includes a lumpy and clear mauve torso balancing atop prosthetic legs, is priced at $32,000, whereas a taller piece that includes lengthy, orange legs and a blue torso, is priced at $64,000.

“Berenice primarily works with supplies from the medical world,” says Javier Amescua, a gross sales affiliate on the gallery. “Her early work on this vein began as a result of whereas she was salvaging supplies from landfills she stored discovering all these discarded prostheses for infants.”

For Schultz, practices like Bravo’s, Roberts’s, Gilbert’s and Olmedo’s—and the forms of areas championing them—are emblematic of Materials’s mission. “There’s a whole lot of actually robust sculpture this yr, which is a change from the pandemic years, when sellers have been extra reliant on work as a result of they’re seen as a safer guess,” he says. “We’ve tried to maintain the honest comparatively inexpensive as a strategy to foster experimentation, and it appears to be working.”

Salón Acme, additionally going down within the Juárez neighbourhood at Proyectos Públicos, likewise gives comparatively inexpensive areas to exhibitors throughout its three predominant sectors: Estado, the place artists and galleries from a particular Mexican state are showcased annually (this yr, Veracruz); Proyectos, for solo shows, curated by the honest’s director Ana Castella; and Convocatoria, which is predicated on a committee’s choice from an open name that this yr obtained round 1,800 submissions.

“We’re at all times how our galleries would possibly cooperate and collaborate, discovering affinities of their programmes to allow them to share assets,” Castella says. “I like to verify the three predominant sectors gel, however we additionally need to enable room for surprises—and there are at all times surprises. The newer galleries at all times put a lot effort and professionalism into their shows.”

Among the many standout shows is a room within the Proyectos sector the place the Mexico Metropolis-based gallery Nixxxon is exhibiting metallic grid sculptures within the shapes of varied physique elements—together with a hand, a butt and a torso—by the native artist Alan Sierra. Priced between $1,000 and $3,500, the sculptures construct upon Sierra’s long-running drawing observe; the gallery can be providing works on paper for $700 to $800.

“I stroll the streets on this neighbourhood on daily basis on my strategy to my studio, and see all these distributors displaying their wares on these metallic grids,” Sierra says. “It occurred to me that these grids are a type of exhibition system.” The butt sculpture as an illustration, per angostam viam (by way of slender paths, 2025), has varied hooks, kitschy keychains and trinkets hanging from it, together with a tiny shovel, a bunch of bananas and a crocodile. The artist provides: “I needed to make sculptures you would play with and modify.”

One other playful and bawdy group of works, within the Estado: Veracruz sector curated by Rafael Toriz, is by the Buenos Aires-born, Coatepec-based artist Florencia Rothschild. Small nude figures are painted throughout greater than a half-dozen of her ceramic sculptures, starting from tiles and vases to extra summary kinds. By the center of the honest’s second day (7 February), all however one—a wall-mounted work priced at $900—had offered.

Castella says nearly all of consumers in Salón Acme’s opening days have been from the US and Mexico, and that teams and representatives from North American museums—together with SFMoMA, the Institute of Up to date Artwork Los Angeles and the Nationwide Gallery of Canada—visited through the preview. She provides: “It’s a terrific second for the town, the festivals and galleries are all doing robust work, and the gross sales have been implausible.”

Each Castella and Schultz say that fears of a attainable Mexico-US commerce conflict sparked on by Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs haven’t had a measurable influence on actions throughout Mexico Metropolis’s Artwork Week. Schultz says: “For lots of the People who’re right here, it is a chance to get away from all that.”

Materials, till 9 February, Expo Reforma, Juárez, Mexico CitySalón Acme, till 9 February, Proyectos Públicos, Juárez, Mexico Metropolis