Every February, Mexico City's museums and galleries pull out their most ambitious work. During Art Week—alongside fairs like Zona Maco and Material—they often debut major historical exhibitions or close out their fall season with receptions that draw the city's art world. This year's lineup tilts toward 20th-century retrospectives while also spotlighting some of today's most watched contemporary voices.
Historical anchors and living practice
Roberto Matta's first solo show in Mexico City in nearly three decades arrives at Galería RGR. The Chilean artist, who spent much of his life moving between Europe and the US, shaped Surrealism's visual language—his semi-abstract, all-over compositions treat space as something alive and dynamic. "La conciencia es un árbol" brings together work from the 1950s through the 1990s, anchoring a conversation about how artists of that era reimagined spatial possibility.
Leonora Carrington gets her own deep dive at OMR. The exhibition centers on her 1964 painting ETHIOPS and traces her transition through the late 1950s and '60s—the moment she moved from European Surrealism toward something entirely her own. Alongside paintings, you'll see costumes and masks she created during this period, plus preparatory drawings for her 1963–64 mural at the Museo Nacional de Antropología, a work that merged her imaginative vision with pre-Columbian visual culture.
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Contemporary investigations
Dorian Ulises López Macías has been photographing Mexico since 2010, capturing bodies and gestures from oblique angles. His first major exhibition, "MEXICANO" at OMR Bodega, presents this archive as a queer re-reading of Mexican aesthetics—a way of seeing that has accumulated quietly for over a decade.
Portuguese artist Leonor Antunes, at Kurimanzutto, continues her research into postwar women artists and designers. For "surface, edge and voids (expanded)," she channels Charlotte Perriand, Léna Bergner, Anni Albers, and Trude Guermonprez through her own hands, creating installations from linoleum, brass, and other materials that honor their legacies while asserting her own vision.
At Museo Jumex, Gabriel de la Mora's survey "La Petite Mort" closes out early February. The Mexico City artist arranges everyday materials—human hair, weathered ceiling tiles—into careful installations that explore death and desire. And at PARA A, housed in a Luis Barragán–designed building, John Sonsini presents watercolors of Latino day laborers, each paid their full day's wages for modeling. The exhibition bears their names: Francisco, Roger, Jorge, David, and others—a quiet insistence on dignity and presence.
Mexico City Art Week runs through early March, with most exhibitions extending into April or May. The city's galleries have timed these shows to overlap, making it possible to move through decades of artistic thought in a single week.
