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 giant crowds to their openings a couple 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 nations, embrace a robust contingent of galleries from Mexico, Peru, Argentina and Colombia.

“This yr is the very best share up to now of galleries collaborating from Latin America,” says Brett W. Schultz, the honest’s co-founder. “It’s necessary that Materials be a viable platform for galleries from Buenos Aires, Santiago, Lima, and so forth. And quite a lot of the collaborating galleries from the UK and US are displaying artists who’re from Latin America, have Latin American heritage or are primarily based right here.”

New York-based Swivel Gallery, as an example, 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 fingers and knees, embedded with imagery and topped with a bull cranium, bought for $14,000 earlier than the tip 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 quite a lot of symbolism in her work—the bull represents her father, and she or he is the spider. The work can also be a little bit of a rebel in opposition to macho tradition—she’s making very muscular sculptures.”

Muscle groups, 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, offered 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 all the time exploring the thought of otherness, and the way when the opposite shouldn’t be understood it turns into feared.”

One other severed limb emblematic of concern 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 dwelling 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. Product of wax, acrylic, hair, cloth and a cufflink, it’s primarily based on an city legend a couple of malevolent bushy hand, la mano peluda, and a well-liked radio present of the identical identify the place individuals name in to share horror tales.

“The set up known as Religion, Hope and Fraud, and it’s primarily based on the headline of a Los Angeles Instances article from 1991 concerning the physician who ran the clandestine hospital the place we’re primarily based, 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 all the time 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 anxiousness 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 are directly 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 may be quite a 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 reasonably priced as a method to foster experimentation, and it appears to be working.”

Salón Acme, additionally going down within the Juárez neighbourhood at Proyectos Públicos, likewise gives comparatively reasonably priced areas to exhibitors throughout its three foremost 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 relies on a committee’s choice from an open name that this yr obtained round 1,800 submissions.

“We’re all the time how our galleries would possibly cooperate and collaborate, discovering affinities of their programmes to allow them to share sources,” Castella says. “I like to verify the three foremost sectors gel, however we additionally need to permit room for surprises—and there are all the time surprises. The newer galleries all the time 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 displaying metallic grid sculptures within the shapes of varied physique components—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 also be providing works on paper for $700 to $800.

“I stroll the streets on this neighbourhood each day on my method 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 form of exhibition system.” The butt sculpture as an example, per angostam viam (by means of slim 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 possibly can 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 types. By the center of the honest’s second day (7 February), all however one—a wall-mounted work priced at $900—had bought.

Castella says nearly all of patrons 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 throughout the preview. She provides: “It’s an excellent 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 doable Mexico-US commerce battle sparked on by Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs haven’t had a measurable affect 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