A Rising Generation of Mexican Artists and Dealers Impress During Mexico City Art Week, But Can the Market Respond?

Shortly before I left for Mexico City last week, I asked a fellow journalist who has reported on the country’s art for years for any advice for a first-timer. “The young Mexican artists are the real life blood of the scene,” she wrote back. “Pay your respects!”

After a week hitting the openings at the city’s emerging galleries, and checking out the presentations on offer at Material Art Fair and Salón Acme, the satellite events to Zona Maco, the city and the region’s most important art fair, her statement undoubtedly rang true. There’s vibrancy, experimentation, and risk rippling through a rising generation of Mexican artists represented by a wave of galleries that have mostly opened since or during the pandemic, including Campeche, PEANA, General Expenses, and Pequod Co., among others.

Many of them were clustered on the first floor of Material and, in conversations with a dealer or artist at one booth, it was almost guaranteed that they would reference one another.

Lodos, a gallery located just a few blocks from Salón Acme, has helped lead this wave. Founder Francisco Cordero Oceguera started the gallery as a project space in a Chicago basement in the early 2010s, while he was studying painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. When he graduated and his visa ran out, he moved home to Mexico City and continued the project while working on his own artistic career. During his time at SAIC, Oceguera became friends with other now high-profile artists like Puppies Puppies and Korakrit Arunanondchai, whom he continued to show at the Lodos project space, which amounted to a second floor in his Mexico City studio.

“My intention was to create a dialogue between what I was interested in, aesthetically and conceptually. I assumed that a lot of artists working here who had the same approach to art would find the space and connect,” Oceguera told ARTnews from his booth on the first day of Material. “It eventually happened.”

The project space morphed into a gallery in 2016, shortly after a particularly rambunctious opening for Arunanondchai, and Oceguera began taking on artists, shifting the program to focus more on locals and participating in like-minded fairs like NADA Miami, the Liste Art Fair in Basel, and Paris Internationale. (Lodos has also been in every edition of Material, whose founder Brett Schultz gave Oceguera his first internship at Yautepec, Schultz’s now-defunct gallery.)

At this year’s edition of Material, Oceguera showed a cross-section of the gallery’s program. In the center of the booth were two strange, humanlike sculptures constructed from infant prosthetics by the Mexico City–based Berenice Olmedo. Also on view was a painting by Samuel Guerrero, who on Monday opened a bracing show at the gallery’s location in Juarez. The show was centered on a large-scale painting that presents a counter-history of Mexican identity blending symbols of a hyper-masculinized past with that of an industrialized future. The painting wraps around the gallery, engulfing the viewer while sections of the painting are interrupted and tied together by mesh fabric, troubling the boundary between painting and tapestry.

Questioning the boundaries of Mexican identity is a recurring concern amongst younger Mexican artists working today. In a nearby booth for Campeche, which opened in 2020, hangs a “drawing on paper”—it looks more like a large-scale painting—by Abraham González Pacheco. Pacheco grew up in a tiny town several hours from Mexico City that he says was “spit out by the revolution”: there is no official record, he doesn’t belong to any known ethnic groups, and he cannot trace his family history beyond his grandparents. Using natural oxide pigments and graphite, Pacheco depicts a clash between Meso-American and Spanish cultures, with references to the working-class culture of his parents and masters of Mexican art like Diego Rivera.

“He is creating his own identity through family myths and also questioning the official history of Mexico and the official narrative about what Mexican identity is,” Fátima González, a cofounder of the gallery, told ARTnews. “It’s about the homogenization of many Mexican cultures. The work is highly political, but its also very personal.”

Also in the booth were works by Ana Hernández, whose show “LADI BEÑE” also opened on Monday at the gallery. In the show, Hernández references and challenges traditions from her Zapotec community near Oaxaca, like a ceremonial dance performed by men involving a large golden fish that Hernández reappropriates and performs in a video installation.

“It has not been intentional,” González said of the recurring concerns with identity. “But our artists share a way of understanding, seeing, and inhabiting the world. The program has been created with a lot of affection, so these connections have happened naturally.”

Pequod, cofounded by gallery veterans Mau Galguera and María García Sainz, opened in 2020 on the eve of the Covid lockdown, after years of the couple doing one-off projects and pop-ups. As Sainz explains, the impetus to open the gallery came from seeing the work coming from artists of their generation—millennials, born in the ’90s—and knowing that there were few spaces dedicated to showing them.

“We saw that this generation was very strong, and we felt that we needed to commit entirely to them,” Sainz told ARTnews from Material. “We were very lucky that, during Covid, people started looking locally.”

Many of the artists on the gallery’s roster got their first representation through Pequod, though not because the artists are particularly early in their career. In the absence of galleries dedicated to showing their work, millennial Mexican artists started their own spaces and collectives in the 2010s to fill the gap. Many of Pequod’s artists were directors at these spaces or were otherwise involved in them. Those artists include Andrew Roberts, who grew up in Tijuana and cofounded Deslave there, and Cristobal Gracia and Paloma Conteraras, both from Mexico City, who were involved in the city’s influential collective Biquini Wax EPS.

“For this generation of artists, they were waiting [so long] for someone to represent them and invest money that they had to become a community,” Sainz said. “We’re very interested in keeping that—building bridges with other galleries, institutions, local and abroad, and other industries.”

SAIC is a link between Lodos and PEANA, the other oldest gallery of this cohort, which was founded in 2017 in Monterrey and shows the artist duo ASMA and Naomi Rincón Gallardo, both of whose work was on view in the gallery and in its booth at Material. “Honestly, when I started the gallery, there was no space for artists of my generation to show,” Ana Pérez Escoto, the founder, told ARTnews. “There are a lot more alternatives now, which is fantastic.”

Escoto, who did an MFA at SAIC, moved the gallery to Mexico City, where she grew up, in 2022. As she tells it, her artists had grown enough that she either needed to move to New York, where she was splitting time, or to the capital. New York wasn’t economically feasible, she said. Gallardo, a veteran of the biennial circuit, including the 2022 Venice Biennale’s Mexican Pavilion, has participated in a few group shows before, including at Lodos. However, the show on view, “Their Silhouettes Bristled with Razors,” is her first solo with PEANA, and her biggest show at a commercial gallery to date. It includes a mesmerizing 2023 video installation, Eclipse, as well an array of watercolor paintings and sculptural objects that storyboard or otherwise draw from the film. (Gallardo has also shown at the gallery and project space Parallel in Oaxaca, where she is based.)

The founding of Pequod and its contemporaries represents a professionalization of the current art scene, which Sainz said is, in many ways, inspired by Kurimanzutto and a generation of artists who came up in the ’90s, like Gabriel Orozco, who opened a career-spanning survey at Museo Jumex earlier this month. A similar process of artists starting spaces and then moving to emerging galleries, which then became today’s big fish, occurred in the ’90s and early 2000s in Mexico City. Though, as Issa Benitez, the founder and director of Proyecto Paralelo and the vice president of GAMA, the local gallery association, told ARTnews, making that jump is something the city’s galleries often struggle with, largely because of the size of the collector base.

The jump from emerging gallery to mid-size and established was on the mind of Alvaro Lopez Ochoa and Ricardo Diaque, the founder and sales director respectively of General Expenses, when I visited the gallery for the Monday opening of Mexico City native Marek Wolfryd, whose work typically explores the market’s valuation of art in pieces that copy, recontextualize, and subvert art history. On view at the gallery were three sculptures that look like melted down amalgamations of iconic contemporary artists’ work like Yayoi Kusama and Anish Kapoor, as well as modern and pre-modern artists. At the entrance to the gallery is a two-digital panel work modeled after Christie’s screens that appear at auction; on the screens play live valuations of various commodities with the design language and text mimicking that of the auction house.

General Expenses grew out of a now-defunct but influential project space, Ladron, after Ochoa and his cofounders couldn’t agree on whether to professionalize the space ahead of their participation in the 2019 edition of Material. Ochoa ended up taking the spot as General Expenses showing much the same roster of artists, and then established the gallery in Centro—far from the other scenes in chic Roma and ritzy Polanco—in 2022. Ochoa started as a collector and friend of the current generation of artists, whose post-graduate scene he hung around. Most graduated from SOMA, a local arts nonprofit that offers a two-year academic program that Ochoa said is similar to an MFA. The growth and reputation of the gallery has developed organically, according to Diaque, who used to work at Labor, one of the big three galleries in Mexico City, along with Kurimanzutto and OMR.

“A lot of people gravitate toward General Expenses because of its such a fertile ground for experimentation, almost like a project space,” Diaque said. “There’s this energy that seems to bring not only curators, but other artists, collectors, and institutions.”

Like Lodos, General Expenses seems to be after cultivating and preserving a more rough-and-tumble spirit for the gallery. As Ochoa explained, they placed the gallery in Centro so that they would stand out, even if they lose foot traffic, and, instead of the typical fancy collector dinners, they have held more open BBQs with tacos and beer. The mindset, according to Diaque, is similar to Donald Judd’s when it came to Marfa: if you build it, they will come.

“If we continue doing what we do, and trust the artists that we’re working with, then new generations [of collectors] will manifest,” Diaque said. “All we have to do is have the doors open and have something inside where a stranger feels welcome.”

But growth can be limited, they both agreed, both by the small existing collector base and the fact that many new, younger ones have their collecting strategies guided by their aesthetically conservative parents. Cracking the “oasis of the 1 percent” in the country, as Ochoa described it, is difficult work that requires nurturing intergenerational relationships.

During the pandemic, a wave of American and European galleries, like many local dealers, opened up shop in the hopes of tapping that 1 percent, and also the flood of American and European expats that arrived then as well. Most of those galleries have since closed, a fact that Ochoa and Diaque said represents the difficulty of navigating the city’s unspoken rules. It also is emblematic of the fact that the expats, many of whom are now leaving, were interested in Mexico City as a cheap, “fetishized” space of experimentation, according to Diaque, not as a place for purchasing art.

The galleries’ influence can be felt across the city during art week. At Salón Acme, the central courtyard is taken up by an immersive multimedia installation mapping urban vegetation by Julieta Gil, who shows with Campeche. At Museo Anahuacalli, an architecturally stunning museum and art space built by Diego Rivera to house his collection of pre-Hispanic artifacts, a show by Paloma Contreras and Carolina Fusilier responds and recontextualizes the space via a Mesomerican futurism drawn from Latin American science fiction and horror B-movies. Pequod’s first show was with Contreras, while Fusilier, who lives in Oaxaca but is from Buenos Aires, shows with PEANA. At Museo Tamayo, the main public contemporary art museum, the ongoing show “OTR”S MUND”S,” which acts as a kind of survey of Mexico City artists, features a major installation by Campeche’s Pacheco, as wel as many other artists represented by the aforementioned galleries.

Still, the question that hangs over each, is whether the Mexican market can support growing the galleries beyond their current state to something more akin to Kurimanzutto, or even something moderately smaller. To Benitez, the key will be whether the galleries can draw in collectors from outside Mexico City, like Monterrey, Guadalajara, or Mérida, which have their own monied elite, but which lack much collecting experience.

“As much as the market [in Mexico] is very vulnerable and not really mature, the art scene is not,” said Benitez. “The artists here are amazing … But the market is not up to speed with that. That’s the contradiction.”

It’s anybody’s guess when that contradiction will be resolved. But the artists are there, waiting.