#latin-american-abstraction

#latin-american-abstraction

Valeria Luiselli, an acclaimed author, discusses the intricacies of Julio Cortázar's 'The Night Face Up,' highlighting its themes and narrative structure that intertwine reality and dreams.

Pianist Dr. Gabriela Calderón and violinist Dr. Catalina Barraza celebrate the rich musical heritage of Latin America.

For the Escarrias-petite sisters of African descent born ten months apart in Cali, Colombia-commercial photography was in their family DNA. Their parents established a studio in their hometown that was overseen by their mother after their father's early demise. The siblings learned the family trade, and when they fled the country's civil war in 1958, they quickly reestablished the studio in Buenos Aires.

In the just-named Grammy Album of the Year, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS-which Bad Bunny has declared his " most Puerto Rican album " to date-the supernova reggaetonero painted an evocative portrait of the Caribbean island, while declaring to a whopping 8.6 million listeners: "VOY A LLeVARTE PA PR" (I'm going to bring you to Puerto Rico). And he did. Last year, a record-breaking number of tourists-7,486,000 to be exact-visited Puerto Rico's tropical shores.

Now, he celebrates his first major presentation in Latin America, in congruence with Mexico City Art Week 2026 and ZSONAMACO, showcasing on an ideal stage inside one of the city's most architecturally layered interiors. Titled The Resident, the site-responsive installation, created during a residency at the Diez Company house, transforms the historic showroom into an immersive tableau where more than 50 works negotiate the boundaries between collectible design, contemporary art, and spatial theater.

We were supposed to be Frieze's special guests. And we feel like we're being censored, racially profiled and discriminated against. Having worked with the fair for five years, she says she will not continue beyond this weekend.

In 2024, art collector Christian Levett opened Europe's first museum dedicated to women artists in a little town in the south of France. But for those of us who can't make the trip to the Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins (Female Artists of the Mougins Museum, or FAMM), the American Federation of the Arts (AFA) has arranged the next best thing: a blockbuster touring exhibition about women artists of the Abstract Expressionist movement, featuring some of the highlights of the FAMM collection.

An exhibition of Wifredo Lam is about as safe a bet as the Museum of Modern Art can place and still plausibly say that it's a bet on expanding the canon. The Cuban artist is one of the most famous painters of the 20th century, featured in almost every single key show about Surrealism. MoMA acquired his famous painting The Jungle in 1946, a few years after he made it.

Taking over the colourful Casa Gilardi, Luis Barragán's last commissioned residence, built for the advertising executive Francisco Gilardi in the mid-1970s, the German artist Gregor Hildebrandt transforms the house's stylish rooms with an ever-expanding exhibition of his enigmatic works across various media. Known for transforming outmoded analogue recording media-including audio cassettes, VHS tapes and vinyl records-into paintings, sculptures and large-scale installations, the Berlin-based artist's conceptual works explore themes of memory, nostalgia and the physical representation of intangible sound and sight.

OSCAR MURILLO (b. 1986, La Paila, Colombia) has developed a multifaceted and challenging practice that spans painting, collaborative projects, video, sound and installation. Through each body of work, the artist probes ideas of collectivity and shared culture, demonstrating a commitment to the power of material presence alongside complex meditations on contemporary society. A focus on the social dimension that sits on the border between performance and events is also central to Murillo's practice.

"The new venue has allowed us to develop the experience of the fair-it lends itself to being more of a destination," Brett W. Schultz, the co-founder and director of Material, tells The Art Newspaper. The fair features over 70 exhibitors this year, with an especially strong contingent of Mexico City galleries that, like Material, have been around for a little over a decade.

Regina Silveira has spent the better part of three decades considering the relationship between media and meaning, particularly as it relates to Latin America. First presented in 1997, "To Be Continued..." features 100 black-and-white reproductions of photos, newspaper clippings, propaganda, advertisements, and more. Silveira nests each image into an oversized puzzle piece, which cuts off faces and scenes to leave fragments of pop culture icons, flora and fauna, and even the occasional mugshot spliced next to one another.

As an editor, you learn to pay attention to the nuances of language. How we phrase something can speak volumes about our perspectives. Some words are fine in one context, but in another they might be detrimental. "Victim" is an example - who wants "victimhood" to encompass their whole person? And possessives are a minefield of power relationships; for instance, a person experiencing mistreatment at the hands of a partner should be defined by neither the treatment nor the tormenter

This is the site of the Florida state historical marker commemorating Arthur Lee McDuffie, a Black insurance broker and former US Marine whose 1979 beating death at the hands of Miami police ignited one of the most consequential uprisings in the city's history. A plaque unveiled in February 2024 at the site of his attack finally acknowledged the violence that fractured McDuffie's skull and the community-wide outrage that followed.

MADRID - The most famous portrait of Maruja Mallo depicts the artist covered from head to toe in seaweed. She is crowned and draped with long, rope-like strands of kelp, her arms raised triumphantly like an all-powerful marine goddess. This unconventional photograph, snapped in 1945 by the poet Pablo Neruda on a Chilean beach, was no doubt carefully orchestrated by the Spanish artist, who viewed herself as an extension of her unique work, where female energy is a conduit for natural and even cosmic forces.

Galerie Nordenhake Mexico City is pleased to present Zigzags and Curves, an exhibition by Sarah Crowner that brings together her sustained research into geometry, abstraction, and the expanded language of painting. Presented across two sites - the gallery's Mexico City space and Casa Roja in Lomas de Chapultepec-the exhibition takes its title from the fundamental graphic elements that structure Crowner's visual vocabulary: the zigzag and the curve.

Six months before his momentous first trip to the United States, Joan Miró sent a letter to his New York City gallerist, Pierre Matisse. Writing from repressive Francoist Spain in the austere aftermath of the Second World War, the Catalan artist was searching for new frontiers. "In the future world, America, with its energy and vitality, must play a leading role," he told Matisse." I have to be in New York to be in direct, personal contact with your country; my work will benefit from that shock."