Mexico City’s hulking Centro Banamex convention centre is once again hosting the Zona Maco fair (until 8 February), and though the geopolitical turbulence in the Western Hemisphere is felt—in conversations in the aisles, and on some stands’ walls—the atmosphere during Wednesday’s preview and Thursday’s opening day was buoyant. The addition of the concurrent Art Basel Qatar fair to the increasingly congested art market calendar has done little to detract from the turnout of collectors, curators and museum groups from the Americas, as well as from Europe.
“One of the first sales we made was to a lovely couple we’d never met before who were here with a museum group from Munich,” says Sean Kelly, whose eponymous New York-based gallery is showing a group of works by artists including Marina Abramović, Kehinde Wiley, Janaina Tschäpe, Ana González and others. They are priced between $20,000 and $300,000. Kelly noted the presence at the fair of “a lot of Americans trying to escape both the weather and the idiot in the White House”.
Kelly added that one of the fair’s strengths is that, even amid the boisterous crowd energy, he and his team are able to have long, in-depth conversations with visitors. “We had a prominent New York curator on the stand for an hour and a half [on Wednesday]—if we were at any other fair, that would never happen.”
Teófilo Cohen, a director at the influential Mexico City gallery Proyectos Monclova, concurs. “This fair is different from every other fair—it’s not all the same international galleries showing the same thing every year,” he says. “People come here because they want to discover something new.”
Ceramic sculptures by Víctor Hugo Pérez on Proyectos Monclova's stand at Zona Maco Photo by Ramiro Chaves, Courtesy of Proyectos Monclova
The Proyectos Monclova stand includes, among other works, a series of dystopian, science-fiction tinged paintings by the Havana-based artist Brenda Cabrera, intricate gouache and pencil compositions on wood by the Mexico City-born artist Circe Irasema and a wall of ceramic sculptures by the Guadalajara-based artist Víctor Hugo Pérez. “Victor has been working with traditional ceramic processes from Guadalajara that are disappearing,” Cohen says. The sculptures, contemporary reinterpretations of pre-Hispanic vases and figures of dogs and cats, are priced between $3,000 and $6,000.
Ceramics and, more broadly, works foregrounding material techniques feature prominently throughout Zona Maco this year. “There’s a very strong response to materiality at Zona Maco, which is quite distinct,” Kelly says.
Among the exhibitors tapping into that predilection is Kouri + Corrao, a gallery based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is showing works by two artists specialised in textiles—Karen Hampton and Kendall Ross—and two specialised in ceramics—Raven Halfmoon and Joon Hee Kim. Prices on the stand range from $500 for Ross’s hand-knitted underwear emblazoned with pointed and political slogans to $40,000 for Hampton’s large mixed-media woven works incorporating dyes made from plants she grows herself.
“Most of the artists we work with make art about identity and push the boundaries of their media,” says Justin Kouri, a managing partner at the Kouri + Corrao. He adds that the gallery made several sales during Wednesday’s VIP preview and that overall “the energy is strong” at the fair.
Materiality is also a prominent feature on the stand of Palo Gallery, from New York, which has paired intricate wood sculptures by the Mexico-born, New York-based artist Raul De Lara with architectural constructions of cinderblock, plaster and ceramics by the Brazilian artist Manoela Medeiros.
“Both these artists are making work about their heritage,” says Paul Henkel, Palo Gallery’s founder. “For Raul it’s about his experience as an immigrant, and a longing for the Mexico of his youth. For Manoela it’s about Brazilian Modernist architecture and design, and how we live with and adapt our build environments.” Works on the stand are priced between $6,000 and $25,000.
Henkel says that within the first hours of the fair he spoke with members of museum groups and curators from MoMA PS1 in New York, London’s Tate, SFMoMA in San Francisco and Museum Brandhorst in Munich, among others. A list of visiting museum groups compiled by the fair’s organisers stretches to more than 75, with an especially strong contingent of institutions from the US and Canada.
The Livia Benavides stand at Zona Maco Courtesy Livia Benavides
“We’ve seen a lot of collectors and institutions from Canada,” says Maria Godoy, a manager at the Lima-based Livia Benavides Gallery. “Overall the collectors here are very serious. I’ve spoken to a lot of people who are already familiar with our programme, they arrive at our booth already knowing many of our artists.”
Most of the six artists featured on the gallery’s stand (priced between $10,000 and $60,000) are either based in Mexico City or have recent or upcoming projects in the city. The Peruvian artist Rita Ponce de León, who has two large works on paper on the stand, is based in the Mexican capital and is featured in El gesto y lo invisible, an exhibition opening at the Museo Tamayo on Friday (6 February). The Lima-born artist Fátima Rodrigo, who is showing a towering new sequin-on-fabric abstraction, will open a solo exhibition at Museo Tamayo in June.
Works by Kylie Manning on the Pace Gallery stand at Zona Maco Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
Pace Gallery, the largest international dealership showing at Zona Maco, sold almost all the work from its solo stand of large-scale abstract paintings by the New York-based artist Kylie Manning during the VIP preview. “The day one energy was frenetic! The booth is nearly sold out, with all day one sales made to local collections,” says Simone Shields, a director at Pace. “At the edge of things (2025), a triptych by Kylie Manning sitting at the conceptual and physical focal point of our presentation, was acquired by a seminal collection in Mexico.”
Galleries big and small, young and old are benefiting from Mexico City’s rising standing on the global art stage. The city’s oldest gallery, Galeria de Arte Mexicano—which celebrated its 90th anniversary during last year’s Zona Maco—started the fair strong. “We have been participating since the first year of the fair, and this opening day was the busiest we have ever seen it in [those] 24 years,” says Patricia Torres, a coordinator at the gallery. “For the past six to eight years, there has been an enormous increase in the number of international visitors for Mexico City Art Week.”
The gallery’s stand features a mix of artists, from leading Modernists such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros to established contemporary figures like Jan Hendrix and María Sada, to emerging artists like Andrea Villalón and Mariana Paniagua Cortés.
Meanwhile Ambar Quijano, whose eponymous gallery opened three years ago, is participating in her first fair and says she made enough sales during Wednesday’s VIP preview to cover the costs of her stand. She is showing works by three artists—Sebastián Hidalgo from Mexico, Armig Santos from Puerto Rico and Paula Turmina from Brazil—on a stand whose arched entryway is intended to evoke the architecture of her space in the Escadon neighbourhood.
“All three artists are interested in speculative futures—imagining spaces where new realities are possible,” Quijano says. Works on the stand are priced between $1,500 for a small marble work by Hidalgo to $25,000 for a large canvas by Santos. The Santos work interprets art historical imagery through the lens of contemporary life in Puerto Rico.
Installation view of the Kates-Ferri Projects stand at Zona Maco Courtesy Kates-Ferri Projects
The New York-based gallery Kates-Ferri Projects is presenting a three-artist stand, anchored by the Mexican artist Salvador Jimenez Flores’s blown-glass sculpture of a cactus-like bust (or bust-like cactus). His work is flanked by paintings by the Venezuelan artist Luis Figueroa and, above them, sculptural ceramic weeds by the Pakistani artist Noormah Jamal, each of which encloses a tiny head in place of a flower. Natalie Kates, the gallery’s co-founder, describes the curatorial theme as “nature run amok”.
“This is our third time doing Zona Maco and we’re seeing fewer US collectors than in years past,” Kates says. “But we have sold works to several multi-generational Latin American collectors—people whose grandparents started collecting. Now the children and grandchildren have a say in shaping the collection.”
Works are priced from $10,000 for Flores’s glass cactus to $1,500 for Jamal’s ceramic weeds. “It’s an entrypoint that is accessible to newer collectors but will make an enormous difference to the artist.”
- Zona Maco, until 8 February, Centro Banamex, Mexico City
