Each February, Mexico City Art Week transforms the capital into one of the most dynamic hubs in the global contemporary art calendar, with Zona MACO anchoring a constellation of fairs, exhibitions, and cultural programming across the city. Beyond the fair booths, galleries and museums unveil major solo presentations and thematic group exhibitions that offer deeper insight into the artists shaping today’s discourse.
This year, visitors will encounter a wide spectrum of practices—from material-driven abstraction and politically charged figuration to sculptural explorations rooted in memory, mythology, and collective experience. Spanning neighborhoods from Juárez and Roma to Polanco and Chapultepec, these exhibitions reflect Mexico City’s role as both a regional epicenter and an international meeting point for contemporary art.
Below, Whitewall highlights the essential exhibitions to experience while in town for Zona MACO and Mexico City Art Week 2026, offering a curated roadmap for navigating the city’s vibrant gallery and museum landscape.
Oscar Murillo: “El Pozo de Agua”
kurimanzutto
San Miguel Chapultepec
Oscar Murillo, “El pozo de agua,” Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and kurimanzutto.
Oscar Murillo’s expansive exhibition brings together 15 years of work that reflects his ongoing investigations into collectivity, material exchange, and social experience. Murillo’s multidisciplinary practice—spanning painting, installation, performance, and participatory projects—foregrounds collaboration as both method and message. The paintings on view emerge from layered processes, often incorporating canvases accumulated over time or drawn from his long-running Frequencies archive.
These composite surfaces reveal dense accumulations of pigment, gesture, language, and printed transfers, resulting in works that oscillate between intuition and structure. The exhibition reflects Murillo’s sustained interest in global economic and social circulation, positioning painting as both a physical negotiation with material and a metaphor for shared human experience.
What We Love: Murillo’s paintings operate like social archives—layered, collaborative, and constantly evolving through time and participation.
Oscar Murillo at Kurimanzutto
February 4 – March 28, 2026
Marcel Dzama: “I Am The Sun, I Am The New Year”
OMR
Colonia Roma
Courtesy of Marcel Dzama and OMR.
Marcel Dzama’s latest exhibition unfolds as a theatrical and surreal environment inspired by Dadaist strategies and poetic resistance. Referencing figures such as Marcel Duchamp and Federico García Lorca, the presentation positions fantasy as a form of political imagination. Through drawing, sculpture, and immersive installation, Dzama constructs narrative worlds populated by masked performers, celestial symbols, and mythic characters.
Set across dreamlike landscapes that traverse dance floors, lunar terrains, and aquatic environments, the works challenge authoritarian narratives while embracing playful subversion. Dzama’s distinctive visual language merges historical reference with whimsical symbolism, offering viewers an allegorical meditation on power, revolution, and the persistence of artistic imagination.
What We Love: Dzama transforms historical and political tension into imaginative storytelling that feels both playful and quietly radical.
Marcel Dzama at OMR
February 3 – April 11, 2026
Gabriel Garcilazo: “Archive of the Persistent Narrative”
Proyectos Monclova
Roma Norte
Courtesy of Gabriel Garcilazo and Proyectos Monclova.
Continuing a decade-long research project rooted in historical reinterpretation, Gabriel Garcilazo revisits colonial and contemporary narratives through drawing, archival study, and political critique. Building on his earlier body of work Códice Váquero, the exhibition reexamines the Codex Azcatitlan—an illustrated manuscript chronicling the Mexica migration and founding mythology of Tenochtitlán.
Garcilazo reframes this historical source through meticulously executed ink drawings that confront modern systems of violence, including weapons trafficking and the movement of narcotics across borders. By merging pre-Hispanic visual storytelling with present-day geopolitical realities, the exhibition highlights how myth, history, and contemporary power structures intersect.
What We Love: Garcilazo’s ability to collapse myth, history, and contemporary politics into a visual language that feels urgent yet deeply rooted in cultural memory.
Gabriel Garcilazo at Proyectos Monclova
February 3 – March 21, 2026
Carmen Neely: “A Trace Beyond the Life of the Body”
Mariane Ibrahim
Cuauhtémoc
Installation view of Carmen Neely: “A Trace Beyond the Life of the Body,” Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim.
Carmen Neely’s first solo exhibition in Latin America marks a significant evolution in her painting practice. Known for her layered, textually informed compositions, Neely approaches painting as an act of inscription—one that records psychological and political transformations across delicate chromatic surfaces.
In this new body of work, Neely introduces canvases prepared with a subtle beige ground, shifting away from her traditionally transparent surfaces. The tonal adjustment functions as a conceptual threshold, allowing histories and emotional registers to emerge through gestures that oscillate between clarity and erasure. Engaging with themes of memory, rewriting, and political visibility, the exhibition positions painting as a site where contemporary realities are negotiated and reinterpreted.
What We Love: Neely’s restrained palette and layered surfaces create quiet but deeply charged paintings that hold emotional and historical weight.
Carmen Neely at Mariane Ibrahim
February 2 – May 2, 2026
Tania Pérez Córdova: “El Aire, Hoy”
Travesía Cuatro
Roma Norte
Installation view of Tania Pérez Córdova: “El Aire, Hoy” at Travesía Cuatro, Courtesy of the artist and Travesía Cuatro.
Tania Pérez Córdova’s sculptural practice explores the temporal and narrative lives of objects, and her exhibition “El aire, hoy” expands these investigations through works that prioritize sensation over fixed interpretation. The presentation unfolds as an intuitive environment in which materials function as carriers of memory, use, and transformation.
Through subtle interventions that alter or suspend familiar objects, Pérez Córdova examines how meaning shifts as materials move through different contexts. The works engage political and environmental uncertainty while encouraging viewers to consider sculpture as an evolving event shaped by time, interaction, and perception.
What We Love: Pérez Córdova treats objects as living narratives—shifting meaning through time, context, and viewer interaction.
Tania Pérez Córdova at Travesía Cuatro
February 3 – March 28, 2026
“Nigredo → Albedo → Rubedo”
JO-HS
San Miguel Chapultepec
Installation view of “Nigredo → Albedo → Rubedo” at JO-HS, Courtesy of JO-HS.
Drawing from alchemical philosophy, this ambitious group exhibition brings together a wide roster of international and Mexican artists exploring transformation as both material process and psychological journey. Structured around the three symbolic stages of the alchemical Great Work—dissolution, purification, and integration—the exhibition unfolds as a spatial narrative.
Works transition across tonal and emotional registers, guiding viewers through darkness toward resolution and unity. The gallery itself functions as an immersive vessel where sculpture, installation, and conceptual works reflect transformation as a continuous and collective process. By revisiting alchemy’s symbolic language, the exhibition bridges historical mysticism with contemporary artistic inquiry.
What We Love: The exhibition’s curatorial structure turns the gallery into a symbolic journey—inviting viewers to experience transformation rather than simply observe it.
“Nigredo → Albedo → Rubedo” at JO-HS
February 3 – 28, 2026
Simone Fattal
Museo Jumex
Nuevo Polanco
Installation view of Simone Fattal at Museo Jumex, Courtesy of the artist and Museo Jumex.
Presented in collaboration with the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco, Museo Jumex showcases three sculptures by Simone Fattal, marking the artist’s first institutional presentation in Mexico. Installed within the museum plaza, the works activate public space through meditations on myth, memory, and human archetypes.
Including key sculptures such as Adam and Eve and Door, the presentation reflects Fattal’s interest in storytelling through form. Drawing from literary, historical, and spiritual references, her sculptures create poetic encounters between ancient narratives and contemporary experience, reinforcing the museum’s commitment to international artistic dialogue.
What We Love: Fattal’s sculptures bring myth into public space, creating contemplative moments that feel both timeless and deeply personal.
Simone Fattal at Museo Jumex
February 3 – March 1, 2026
Rafa Esparza: “Juntxs”
LagoAlgo
Bosque de Chapultepec
Courtesy of Rafa Esparza and LagoAlgo.
Rafa Esparza’s multidisciplinary installation juntxs explores community, resilience, and collective care through immersive environments that merge sculpture, architecture, performance, and sound. Central to the exhibition is adobe, a material historically associated with communal labor and ancestral knowledge.
Across interconnected spaces, Esparza constructs landscapes that blur boundaries between domestic and public environments, foregrounding queer, clandestine, and diasporic narratives. The works emphasize care as both a political strategy and an embodied practice, highlighting how collective labor and shared space can function as forms of resistance and survival.
What We Love: Esparza transforms architecture and material into emotional and political landscapes centered on community and care.
Rafa Esparza at LagoAlgo
February 5 – May 31, 2026
