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 truthful Distinctive Design X, guests crammed the aisles and customary areas on Thursday (6 February). The 72 exhibitors at Materials, hailing from 20 international locations, embrace a robust contingent of galleries from Mexico, Peru, Argentina and Colombia.

“This 12 months is the best share to this point of galleries taking part from Latin America,” says Brett W. Schultz, the truthful’s co-founder. “It’s vital that Materials be a viable platform for galleries from Buenos Aires, Santiago, Lima, and so forth. And plenty of the taking part 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 palms and knees, embedded with imagery and topped with a bull cranium, offered 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 plenty 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 riot in opposition to macho tradition—she’s making very muscular sculptures.”

Muscular tissues, bones, tendons and limbs of varied kinds 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 contains inside its group presentation a sculpture by the Tijuana-born artist Andrew Roberts that consists of a hyperrealistic severed zombie leg coated 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 at all times exploring the thought of otherness, and the way when the opposite will not 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 offers 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 residence 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. Manufactured from wax, acrylic, hair, material and a cufflink, it’s primarily based on an city legend a couple of malevolent furry hand, la mano peluda, and a preferred radio present of the identical title 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 Occasions article from 1991 in regards to 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 contains 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 choice 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 attempting to commemorate its previous on this present second of chaos and nervousness on the border.”

The stand of the Mexico Metropolis-based gallery Lodos contains 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 saved 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 plenty of actually robust sculpture this 12 months, 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 truthful 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 provides comparatively reasonably priced areas to exhibitors throughout its three predominant sectors: Estado, the place artists and galleries from a selected Mexican state are showcased annually (this 12 months, Veracruz); Proyectos, for solo displays, curated by the truthful’s director Ana Castella; and Convocatoria, which is predicated on a committee’s choice from an open name that this 12 months 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 ensure 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 displays.”

Among the many standout displays is a room within the Proyectos sector the place the Mexico Metropolis-based gallery Nixxxon is displaying steel 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 follow; the gallery can be providing works on paper for $700 to $800.

“I stroll the streets on this neighbourhood on daily basis on my method to my studio, and see all these distributors displaying their wares on these steel grids,” Sierra says. “It occurred to me that these grids are a type of exhibition gadget.” The butt sculpture as an example, per angostam viam (by way of slender paths, 2025), has numerous 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 might 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 truthful’s second day (7 February), all however one—a wall-mounted work priced at $900—had offered.

Castella says the vast majority 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 Modern Artwork Los Angeles and the Nationwide Gallery of Canada—visited in the course of the preview. She provides: “It’s an incredible second for town, the festivals and galleries are all doing robust work, and the gross sales have been unbelievable.”

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 impression on actions throughout Mexico Metropolis’s Artwork Week. Schultz says: “For lots of the Individuals who’re right here, it is a possibility to get away from all that.”

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