10 Exhibitions Not to Miss During Mexico City Art Week
Beginning in the 1990s, the Mexican art scene has experienced sustained growth, driven largely by internal forces. Among the most decisive was the emergence of a strong local gallery system and, crucially, the launch of ZONAMACO by Zélika García in 2004, which gave Mexico City a stable market platform for international exchange and visibility. The scene’s globalization accelerated during and after the pandemic, as Mexico City became a favored destination for travelers and digital nomads far beyond the art world.
Beyond ZONAMACO, CDMX today supports a fully developed cultural ecosystem of galleries, museums and artist studios that give depth and continuity to an already vibrant scene—one that comes fully alive during Mexico City Art Week in early February. The week-long schedule of activations, exhibitions and fairs has become a key stop for collectors, curators and advisors looking to discover some of the most compelling artistic voices emerging across Central and South America. While ZONAMACO remains the week’s gravitational center, CDMX Art Week is shaped just as much by its satellite fairs. Feria MATERIAL and SALÓN ACME, in particular, offer early access to younger artists and galleries, often at accessible price points and frequently just ahead of broader market recognition.
What sets CDMX apart from other arts destinations is the density of its gallery landscape and the breadth of its institutional offerings, which range from historical pillars such as the Palacio de Bellas Artes, the Museo de Arte Moderno and the indispensable Museo Nacional de Antropología—with its deep immersion into ancient civilizations and ancestral cosmologies—to the contemporary programming of Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo. To help you navigate this intense week—and make the most of it—here is our guide to the Mexico City’s must-see art exhibitions.
The must-see shows in CDMX
- Leonora Carrigton’s “Ethiops”
- Roberto Matta, “La conciencia es un árbol”
- “La Rebelión de los Objetos”
- Oscar Murillo’s “el pozo de agua”
- Gabriel De La Mora’s “La Petite Morte”
- Troika and Trevor Paglen’s “Alucinaciones”
- “Once Upon a Time in Chapultepec Heights”
- Gregor Hildebrandt at Casa Gilardi
- Maria Fragoso’s “Volver Una Pieza”
- Brazilian abstraction by Macaparana and Juan Parada
Leonora Carrigton’s “Ethiops”
- OMR Galeria, through April 11, 2026
Leonora Carrington has, in just a few years, ascended to the status of both legend and emblem—standing at the intersection of the rediscovery of female Surrealist painters and the broader reassessment of modern Latin American art. Her record-breaking rise on the market has unfolded in tandem with a long-overdue institutional reckoning, one that has repositioned her not as a marginal figure orbiting Surrealism but as one of its most singular and enduring voices. That visibility expanded exponentially following the 2022 Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani, whose title drew directly from one of Carrington’s own books, and accelerated once her paintings began appearing at auction—culminating in the $28.5 million sale of Les Distractions de Dagobert at Sotheby’s New York in May 2024. British-born but long based in Mexico City, Carrington never treated Surrealism as an escapist refuge. Rather, she adopted its language and ethos as a way to make visible the secret forces and voices her sensibility apprehended—gesturing toward alternative spiritual dimensions capable of resisting and moving beyond the constricting social norms and historical violence that shaped much of the 20th Century. The museum-quality exhibition at OMR brings together a focused selection of works produced in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, placed in direct dialogue with the 1964 painting that gives the exhibition its name. The selection foregrounds Carrington’s role as a pioneer of ecofeminist thinking, non-human ontologies and speculative fiction—particularly her ability to mobilize archetypal and mythical languages to imagine symbiotic, interspecies forms of coexistence that dismantle rigid, human-centered hierarchies. A central section of the exhibition presents preparatory drawings and working studies for the mural Mito y religión de los mayas de las tierras altas (1963-1964), created for the Museo Nacional de Antropología, offering rare insight into the conceptual and formal genesis of one of the foundational works of her career.
Roberto Matta, “La conciencia es un árbol”
- Galería RGR, through March 28, 2026
Galería RGR is staging a museum-grade exhibition dedicated to the Chilean Surrealist Roberto Matta, marking his first solo presentation in Mexico in nearly three decades. Matta’s visionary canvases operate in a charged tension between the caricatured and the cosmic, at once earthbound and mystically archetypal, occupying a singular position at the intersection of Surrealism, political consciousness and speculative space. Trained as an architect before joining André Breton’s Surrealist circle in the late 1930s, Matta developed a radically spatial form of abstraction he famously termed “inscapes”—psychological landscapes in which inner states, cosmic forces and socio-political tensions collapse into a single, unstable pictorial field. Through semi-spontaneous mark-making that both depicts and channels matter, energy and space beyond the ordinary three dimensions, his so-called “psychological morphologies” are populated by biomorphic forms, electrical vectors and mutating figures that evoke fluid ecosystems in perpetual metamorphosis as well as dystopian, futuristic battlefields. Unlike many Surrealists, Matta never treated the unconscious as a private dream realm but as a porous terrain and diagnostic tool through which to interrogate power, violence, colonialism and the mechanization and alienation of human life, particularly in the aftermath of World War II and throughout the Cold War. Long overdue, Matta’s institutional reassessment has gained significant momentum in recent years, culminating in his prominent positioning within the Philadelphia Art Museum’s major Surrealism exhibition, “Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100,” where his work is reframed as a crucial bridge between European Surrealism and its global, politically charged afterlives.
“La Rebelión de los Objetos”
- Museo Diego Rivera Anahuacalli, through May 10, 2026
The Anahuacalli Museum offers a singular view of Mexico’s history through the lens, passion and lifelong vision of one of the country’s greatest artistic masters, Diego Rivera. Located in Coyoacán—historically a cultural heart of the city, now part of southern Mexico City—the museum was conceived by Rivera as a life project: a space to house his extraordinary collection of pre-Hispanic art and ultimately bequeath it to the people of Mexico. Built from volcanic stone sourced from the Pedregal, its architecture creates a powerful encounter between art, architecture and landscape, where material weight and symbolic density converge. As it does each year during CDMX art week, the Anahuacalli opens itself to contemporary voices, inviting them into dialogue with its ancient holdings. This year, it hosts the work of L.A.-based, El Salvador–born artist Beatriz Cortez alongside Mexican-American multidisciplinary and performance artist Rafa Esparza. Titled “La Rebelión de los Objetos / The Rebellion of the Objects,” the exhibition stages a charged conversation between present-day practices and ancestral forms—an archaeology of the present in which contemporary gestures meet the spirits, materials and unresolved questions of the past in a resonant reflection across time. Drawing from Indigenous cosmologies in which objects possess a vital dimension that weakens when separated from their spiritual and communal contexts, the exhibition poses a central question: can the museum become a space where objects recover their capacity for symbolic action? Developed through a sustained dialogue between the two artists—who share personal and conceptual ties and have previously collaborated in New York—the show unfolds as a conversation between practices attuned to territory, displacement, memory, spirituality and futurity.
Oscar Murillo’s “el pozo de agua”
- kurimanzutto, through March 28, 2026
Oscar Murillo came of age amid the 2010s boom, benefiting from—and inevitably contending with—the acceleration of a market eager for new gestures. Between roughly 2013 and 2016, fresh out of the Royal College of Art, his work rose meteorically, aligning seamlessly with a post-crisis appetite for materially charged, physically assertive abstraction. Early backing from mega-galleries and the rapid escalation of auction results into the six-figure range almost inevitably led to a market correction. The most recent phase of Murillo’s trajectory, unfolding quietly between 2022 and 2024, has been more thoughtfully orchestrated, with a clear emphasis on institutional consolidation rather than renewed market acceleration. This recalibration has aimed to re-anchor his practice through museum contexts capable of affirming its artistic and cultural value ahead of any financial resurgence. In 2025, Murillo was the subject of a major museum survey spanning Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey, following his 2024 presentation at Tate Modern in London. His inaugural exhibition with kurimanzutto builds on this renewed institutional focus, returning attention to the deeper meanings and energies that have long informed his practice. Murillo’s abstraction has always been deeply physical and emotionally activating, conceived as a means of tracing collectivity and shared culture rather than individual expression alone. Material becomes a vehicle for registering social experience, translating generative moments of collective energy into painterly form.
Gabriel De La Mora’s “La Petite Morte”
- Museo Jumex, through February 8, 2026
Gabriel de la Mora’s artistic practice moves fluidly between the micro and the macro, reimagining a measured order of coexistence that both reflects and crystallizes its vital entropic nature. Through an obsessive process of collecting and cataloging discarded objects—old radios, shoe soles, microscope slides, eggshells, doors and daguerreotypes—de la Mora constructs new geometric assemblages by reconfiguring fragments of materials that appear to have exhausted their utilitarian life. Drawn to the tension between disappearance and reemergence, chance and control, he allows the ephemeral to surface in a new light, giving visibility to the object’s residual aura. Often visibly foregrounding the intensity of human labor involved—whether through the meticulous dissection and mounting of butterfly wings, the setting of human hair into precise geometric compositions or the painstaking transfer of historic, weathered ceilings onto canvas—his works present themselves as seemingly serendipitous encounters of fragments brought into temporary alignment. In these carefully orchestrated assemblages, immaterial values and accumulated histories are compressed and crystallized, if only momentarily, into the illusion of a stable form. Closing soon, the poetic survey at Museo Jumex traces two decades of his practice while foregrounding not only its seductive material allure but also the deeper psychological currents that run through it.
Troika and Trevor Paglen’s “Alucinaciones”
- LagoAlgo, through May 31, 2026
Since its reopening under the stewardship of OMR in 2022, LagoAlgo has emerged as a new cultural landmark in CDMX, bringing contemporary art into the green heart of Chapultepec Park. For the art week, LagoAlgo is staging two major exhibitions: “Capítulo VIII: Alucinaciones,” a dialogue between Trevor Paglen and Troika, and a solo exhibition by Mexican-American artist rafa esparza. The former brings together two of the most compelling voices working at the intersection of art and technology, mathematical and natural order, for a timely reflection on hidden structures of containment, control and expression—mapping new and ancient architectures of being that operate across algorithmic, biological, historical and imagined realms. Spread across four galleries, “Alucinaciones” traces a shared fascination with the ways humans, machines and environments perceive, transform and “dream” one another. Moving between data-driven vision systems, forests threaded with electronics and installations evoking vegetal intelligences, the exhibition places technological, natural and perceptual structures into a fluid dialogue.
“Once Upon a Time in Chapultepec Heights”
- General Expenses, through March 5, 2026
Over the years, General Expenses has become one of Mexico City’s most dynamic and recklessly experimental spaces. With the same wit and irreverent, nonchalantly provocative approach that defines much of the gallery’s program, its second location is presenting Avanguardo’s “Once Upon a Time in Chapultepec Heights,” which turns a mischievous lens toward the plush world of art collecting in Las Lomas, which emerged in the mid-20th Century as a garden suburb for Mexico’s political, financial and industrial elites. The artist’s work often combines multiple cultural devices to engage with desire and its manifestations within consumer culture, staging situations that appear absurd yet remain uncomfortably close to lived, market-driven realities. Through humor sharpened by precision, the works on view expose how luxury and vulnerability coexist, and how seemingly minor gestures can quietly unravel deeper structures of power, access and secrecy. Set against a backdrop of polished floors and tightly controlled domestic routines, the staging reveals how housekeepers carve duplicate keys out of humble Zote soap bars, introducing subtle disruptions into a carefully maintained fantasy of security and control. What initially reads as a humorous, almost paradoxical mise-en-scène opens into a telling tableau that reveals the dynamics of power and privilege in the country, drawing attention to the invisible labor that sustains these mansions and the parallel narratives unfolding just beyond the spotlight.
Gregor Hildebrandt
at Casa Gilardi
- Saeger Galeria at Casa Gilardi, through February 28, 2026
Every year, a different artist and gallery take over Luis Barragán’s chromatic and luminous architectural maze, Casa Gilardi, staging a suggestive dialogue between the iconic space and contemporary art. This year, the intervention is organized by leading CDMX gallery Saenger Galería, with works by Berlin-based artist Gregor Hildebrandt, who enters into conversation with the house through his singular approach to abstraction, rooted in music memorabilia and materially related instruments. Most of the works on view belong to his signature Rip-off Paintings series: abstract and geometric compositions created by transferring the magnetic coating of audio or videotape onto canvas using adhesive, a process partly inspired by the sgraffito-like crayon drawings he made in kindergarten. With the same playful spirit, paired with a rigorous knowledge of music history, Hildebrandt produces paintings, collages, sculptures and immersive environments that quite literally have music embedded within them. Rather than focusing on these materials’ capacity to store or transmit sound, he treats them as mute substances, reinventing and subtly unsettling the traditional idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk. In doing so, he reflects on the accelerated obsolescence of media and artistic forms in the relentless forward motion of technology.
Maria Fragoso’s “Volver Una Pieza”
- PEANA , through April 18, 2026
Long based in the now rapidly expanding Roma Sur district, the gallery is hosting the Mexico City debut of artist Maria Fragoso, who explores the social performance of identity through a new body of psychologically charged yet art history-anchored paintings, rooted in her earliest relationships with matter and image. These suspended figures hold a palpable tension between what once offered protection and what is now exposed, as if the body were doubling itself to reveal its own imprint. The exhibition unfolds according to a logic of passage, inviting the viewer to follow a process of metamorphosis. The shed skins of Fragoso’s characters recall the molting gesture of the snake—abandoning what has grown rigid in order to reemerge in altered form. This imagery resonates with the sacred serpent figures that run through Mexican mythology, particularly Xipe Tótec, whose symbolism of fertility and regeneration hinges on skin as both mask and garment—a threshold between what is discarded and what is reborn. Interior and exterior stretch and blur, shaping a body that is never fixed but perpetually in transition.
Brazilian abstraction by Macaparana and Juan Parada
- Proyectos Monclova, through March 21, 2026
Proyectos Monclova is shining a spotlight on several generations of Brazilian abstraction, bringing together the work of José de Souza Oliveira Filho, known as Macaparana, and Curitiba-based artist Juan Parada. The “Geometric Poetics” of Macaparana—a self-taught painter, draftsman and sculptor—unfold across the gallery’s main floor in a generative tension between spontaneity and rigor, intuitive geometry and intellectual and mathematical logic, building bridges between the rationalist traditions of Concrete art and the more organic legacy of Neo-Concrete practices. On the first floor, the work of Brazilian artist Juan Parada presents “Geometry in Resonance,” a series of ceramic reliefs that explore the tension between the digital and the ancestral. Conceiving ceramics as both an energetic and speculative field, Parada weaves mineral and anthropic architectural structures into living configurations, shaping surfaces that seem to register waves, rhythms and internal resonances. His works ultimately chart and challenge the inner and outer, psychological and sensorial dimensions of experience in the relationship between form, space and meaning.