Installation view, Pace at Zona Maco, Centro Citibanamex, Mexico City.
Mexico City is undoubtedly one of today’s most dynamic art and design centers. A cultural capital where the cost of living is affordable and artisans are readily available to assist with all kinds of production, CDMX—as it’s locally known—attracts more international creative talents daily. The best time to visit is during Mexico City Art Week, when the sprawling city hosts art and design fairs and the museums and galleries present their top shows.
The 21st edition of Zona Maco featured 200 galleries from 29 countries, while Feria Material No. 11 hosted 72 exhibitors from 25 different cities. Growing in numbers, the city was also home to several satellite fairs and exhibitions, including Salón ACME, Unique Design X Mexico City, and Clavo.
Monday night was Material Monday, when galleries participating in Feria Material and Expo Reforma opened their doors to the wandering crowds. Tuesday night was Zona Maco’s turn for local exhibitors to highlight their latest exhibitions. Zona Maco opened on Wednesday; Feria Material, Unique Design and Salón ACME opened on Thursday; and Clavo followed on Friday. By the weekend, everyone was catching up on what they had previously missed.
Art & Object focused our attention this year on Zona Maco, the city’s premier art and design platform, as well as Feria Material, the hub for emerging art talent. Scroll through to discover our favorite artists and artworks from these inspiring fairs.
A mixed-media artist who creates sculptural assemblages from found objects and family keepsakes, Amy Bravo was born in New Jersey to Italian and Cuban parents but has lived and worked in New York for the past 10 years. With a BA in Illustration from Pratt Institute and a MFA in Painting from Hunter College, Bravo mines her cultural past and a queer identity with drawings and sculptures that explore themes of femininity, the body, and psychological states.
Her surreal figurative sculptures at the fair included a punching bag, baby boxing gloves, a mannequin arm, a bull skull, and a saddle, along with lace, sewing needles, beads, and threads to depict a spider lady, macho man, and a goddess Kali-like girl. Paired with drawings of tough pig-tailed women donning boxing gloves and gripping the bloody decapitated heads of roosters, her solo presentation showcased a striking display of unrestrained creative power.
Image: Amy Bravo, Loom, 2024. Found Objects, Wax, Bone, Acrylic, and String, 31 H x 30 W x 13 D in / 79 H x 76 W x 33 D cm.
Returning to the personal painting style that first earned him global recognition, Julian Schnabel unveiled two dynamic plate paintings of the renowned Mexican artist Frida Kahlo at the fair. Constructed from a combination of crockery shards, oil paint, and bondo on aluminum panels, the paired paintings deconstruct Kahlo’s 1939 self-portrait, The Two Fridas, which she painted introspectively following her divorce from Diego Rivera.
Displayed on a pink wall of the gallery’s Luis Barragán-inspired booth, the paintings and the stylish architectural design of the space immediately captured the attention of fairgoers, transporting everyone into the city’s unique cultural realm.
Image: Julian Schnabel, One of the Two Fridas, 2024-2025. Oil, plates and bondo on aluminum, 60 × 48 in / 152.4 cm × 121.9 cm.
A master at transforming trash into elegant works of art, Chris Soal is an award-winning South African artist (even at Zona Maco, he was one of three artists granted a coveted residency at the Fundación Patiño in Bolivia for his displayed works) who makes surreal sculptures.
Soal creates organically designed wall works through the meticulous assembly of discarded beer bottle caps, both burnt and unburnt wood toothpicks, and reinforced concrete infused with motor oil and fragmented steel rods, offering a distinctive urban view of nature. The wabi-sabi look of his dynamic work, In the wake of wandering, was just as fitting for the evolving environment of Mexico City as it might be for his hometown of Johannesburg.
Image: Chris Soal, In the wake of wandering, 2025. Discarded Beer Bottle Caps threaded onto Electric Fencing Cable, held in Polyurethane Sealant on Board, with burnt and Unburnt Bamboo Birch Wood Toothpicks held in Polyurethane Sealant, Glass Fibre Reinforced Concrete with Used Motor Car Oil and Rebar, 102 3/8 x 84 1/4 x 10 1/4 in / 260 x 214 x 26 cm.
A feminist art collective that emerged during the pandemic in 2020, founded by Brooklyn-based artists Dannielle Tegeder and Sharmistha Ray, Hilma's Ghost gained its first significant opportunity by collaborating with a professional witch to create a tarot deck of geometric abstractions showcased at The Armory Show in New York in 2021.
Since then, the collective has exhibited paintings and drawings and offered programs that confront patriarchal art histories excluding women, trans, and nonbinary practitioners at museums and galleries throughout the Americas. At the fair, Mexico City’s venerable Galería RGR presented a vibrant selection of new esoteric canvases by Hilma's Ghost. Symbolic representations of positive thoughts, these lively abstractions have hopefully found homes where their magic can create the greatest good.
Image: Hilma's Ghost, Welcome, Earth in the North, direction of green wisdom and the mother of all. Thank you for teaching us that you are wise that our bodies are sacred, and both are abundant and enough. Blessed be, 2025. Acrylic and flashe on wood, 16 x 20 in / 40.6 x 50.8 cm.
Marina Abramović, the foremost figure in contemporary performance art, took center stage at the gallery’s Zona Maco booth and during various activities throughout Mexico City Art Week. While lecturing on the history of performance art and reading her 2011 text-based work, An Artist’s Life Manifesto, Abramović sat in a collaboratively designed chair at the iconic Luis Barragán stables at La Cuadra San Cristóbal, where horses with flag-bearing riders wandered around her.
The chair was also on view in an exhibition at La Metropolitana, and as she read, the pages of the text fluttered in the wind, creating a mysterious reflection of the artist’s new life-size photograph, The Message. Photographed by Swiss artist Michel Comte in New York, the portrait depicts Abramović in a flowing black gown, gazing upward at a floating blank piece of paper.
This composition conveys the work's significant meaning, which, in her own words, is: “When we empty ourselves of thought, only then can we truly receive.”
Image: Marina Abramović, The Message, 2024. Black and white inkjet print, Paper: 78 3/4 x 61 in / 200 x 155 cm, framed: 80 5/16 x 62 5/8 x 2 3/8 in / 204 x 159 x 6 cm, edition of 7 with 2 APs (#1/7).
By merging their interpretations of feminist and queer theories with the Latin American tradition of abstract art, the Argentinian artist Ad Minoliti has been producing colorful paintings, sculptures, and installations that transform the language of abstraction for the past 25 years.
Eager to create a universe that is “democratic, open, and a safe space,” the Buenos Aires-based artist utilizes modernist forms, symbols from popular culture, and geometric architectural representation to produce images, objects, and spaces that delightfully transport our thoughts beyond our daily lives.
The Piernas (Legs) painting at the fair was somewhat of a tease for Minoliti’s more extensive solo exhibition at OMR’s Bodega space, where the imaginative artist transformed a room in a warehouse into a sanctuary of sensual shapes and spheres.
Image: Ad Minoliti, Piernas, 2021. Acrylic on canvas, 47 1/4 x 47 1/4 x 1 3/4 in / 120 x 120 x 4.3 cm.
Born in Mexico City and currently based in Amsterdam, Rodrigo Red Sandoval creates industrial-inspired artworks that reflect urban life and cityscapes, where substances and their meanings are concealed yet awaiting discovery. An alumnus of Holland’s prestigious Jan van Eyck Academie with a Master of Fine Arts from the Glasgow School of Art and a BA in Philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Sandoval considers before he creates.
His solo presentation at the gallery’s Feria Material booth, titled "A Grammar of Forgotten Things," featured a selection of seemingly industrial metal materials with cleverly concealed objects, monochromatic paintings of beam-like structures, and a hole cut into the wall with a cinematic sign declaring "The End"—informing the viewer that they were part of a superbly staged scenario.
Image: Rodrigo Red Sandoval, Shell, 2025. Metal mesh, watches, 13 3/4 x 9 7/8 x 2 3/8 in / 35 x 25 x 6 cm.
Best known for his Young Nancy and Margaret drawings, which depict hallucinatory visions of Nancy Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at earlier moments of their mediated lives, Neal Vandenbergh works intuitively and spontaneously to capture the aura of his social subjects.
Based in Chicago, Vandenbergh draws on the traditions of 19th-century spirit photography and the double exposure techniques of modernist photographers to create images that are equally inspired by sci-fi movies, literature, and music.
At the fair, the mystical painter showcased a series of new psychological portraits on paper featuring models with multiple eyes, lost in the shadows of life or surrounded by flowers and jewels they can only dream of being someday showered with.
Image: Neal Vandenbergh, Head in Hands, 2025. Graphite, charcoal, pastel and acrylic on paper on aluminum panel, 19 3/4h x 14 1/2w in.
Fresh off a solo show in Brescia, Italy, and a fortunate participation in the 34th Gwangju Biennale—masterfully curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, where he exhibited one of the paintings showcased at the fair—Vladislav Markov earned a BA from Parsons School of Design before completing his MFA at Cornell University, where he studied under the renowned pictorial abstractionist Carl Ostendarp and Paul Pfeiffer.
Known for deconstructing readymade objects using 3D printing and scanning, the Russian-born, New York-based artist utilized these digital tools to create two large paintings for the fair. Beginning with everyday objects, he digitally reconstructed them using low-level photogrammetry scans. He then transferred them as grids of pigmented prints onto acrylic-painted canvases, beautifully reflecting the rawness of the simulated studio floor that supports his intriguingly altered subjects.
Image: Vladislav Markov, I eat nails, 2024. Pigment and acrylic on canvas. 72 x 84 inches / 183 x 213.5 cm.
A British painter born and based in London, Ross Taylor creates layered canvases where figures emerge over time, reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s imaginary portrait of Dorian Gray. With a Master’s Degree from the Royal College of Art, Taylor excels in painterly techniques, applying a variety of marks to his canvases to create cartoonish, Hairy-Who style characters, somewhat reminiscent of the celebrated Chicago Imagist painters.
By revealing the inner world of his fictional subjects, the artist manipulates the canvas surface until his figures fully come to life. In Brooke Benington’s booth, Taylor presented a collection of figurative canvases specifically created for the fair. Displayed over an abstract turquoise splotch on the booth’s white walls, which matched the shape of the hair on one of his characters and elements of the palette in the vibrant paintings, the works conveyed a pre-Columbian art sensibility while remaining contemporary.
Image: Ross Taylor, Thirteen hollow ones, 2023-2025. Oil on linen, 25 5/8 x 21 5/8 in / 65 x 55 cm.
A mixed-media artist who creates sculptural assemblages from found objects and family keepsakes, Amy Bravo was born in New Jersey to Italian and Cuban parents but has lived and worked in New York for the past 10 years. With a BA in Illustration from Pratt Institute and a MFA in Painting from Hunter College, Bravo mines her cultural past and a queer identity with drawings and sculptures that explore themes of femininity, the body, and psychological states.
Her surreal figurative sculptures at the fair included a punching bag, baby boxing gloves, a mannequin arm, a bull skull, and a saddle, along with lace, sewing needles, beads, and threads to depict a spider lady, macho man, and a goddess Kali-like girl. Paired with drawings of tough pig-tailed women donning boxing gloves and gripping the bloody decapitated heads of roosters, her solo presentation showcased a striking display of unrestrained creative power.
Image: Amy Bravo, Loom, 2024. Found Objects, Wax, Bone, Acrylic, and String, 31 H x 30 W x 13 D in / 79 H x 76 W x 33 D cm.
Returning to the personal painting style that first earned him global recognition, Julian Schnabel unveiled two dynamic plate paintings of the renowned Mexican artist Frida Kahlo at the fair. Constructed from a combination of crockery shards, oil paint, and bondo on aluminum panels, the paired paintings deconstruct Kahlo’s 1939 self-portrait, The Two Fridas, which she painted introspectively following her divorce from Diego Rivera.
Displayed on a pink wall of the gallery’s Luis Barragán-inspired booth, the paintings and the stylish architectural design of the space immediately captured the attention of fairgoers, transporting everyone into the city’s unique cultural realm.
Image: Julian Schnabel, One of the Two Fridas, 2024-2025. Oil, plates and bondo on aluminum, 60 × 48 in / 152.4 cm × 121.9 cm.
Paul Laster
Paul Laster is a writer, editor, curator, advisor, artist, and lecturer. New York Desk Editor for ArtAsiaPacific, Laster is also a Contributing Editor at Raw Vision and Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art and a contributing writer for Art & Object, Ocula, Galerie, Artsy, Sculpture, Time Out New York, Conceptual Fine Arts, and Two Coats of Paint. Formerly the Founding Editor of Artkrush, he began The Daily Beast’s art section and was Art Editor at Russell Simmons’ OneWorld Magazine. Laster has also been the Curatorial Advisor for Intersect Art & Design and an Adjunct Curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, now MoMA PS1.
