FEMACO: The Mexico City Art Fair
By Margaret Failoni May 9, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

A long weekend in Mexico City full of great art events is the ultimate high for me. First thing to do was to rush off to the Zócalo to see Canadian artist Gregory Colbert’s exhibition, “Ashes and Snow” before it closed the following Sunday.

The exhibition consisted of large sepia print photographs printed on Japanese rice paper, about two by three meters across, hung by thin strings along a huge corridor in a stunning bamboo pavilion, specifically designed as a travelling museum for this show. The photos were quite pretty, the subject matter being the delicate relationship of man and animal, all shot in such exotic locales as India, Egypt, Burma, Tonga, Namibia, Sri Lanka, Kenya, the Antarctic and Borneo. The photos were accompanied by three different films on the same subject with soft, exotic music in the background. The star of the show, I must say, was the sensational architecture of this huge, extraordinary bamboo structure.

The evening before the art fair opened, all the major art galleries opened exhibitions. Those I was able to see included the 25-year retrospective at the OMR Gallery featuring the invitations, catalogues, posters and works by all the artists they discovered and promoted over the years, such as Julio Galan, Arturo Elizondo, Xavery Wolski, Laura Cohen, Xavier Marin and Alfonso Riestra.

Across Rio de Janeiro Square is the relatively new AC Galeria Arroniz Arte Contemporaneo with an interesting solo show of works by Daniel Alcalà which consisted of silhouette photos of industrial structures such as giant gas tanks, water tanks and antennas, but with all the outer metal work cut out and collaged onto the original image. Interesting images and very well executed. The nearby Terreno Baldio Gallery showed smaller bronzes by Javier Marin and mixed media embroidered figures by Hector Velazquez.

The reason I mention all this is because, in the end, these exhibitions excited me more than the art fair in general.

This year the fair was held in the huge, ultramodern Banamex Centre in the middle of nowhere. The usual buzz of young artists and art students prevalent on opening nights and the days that follow were missing. If you didn’t have a car, the 30-minute cab fare from the Condesa area cost 100 pesos, and I am told the public transportation system would take well over an hour. Although the wonderful spaces, air-conditioning, plentiful bathrooms and eating venues were welcome, it was generally agreed the fair organizers would do well to find a different location for the future. On opening night and the day that followed, the fair seemed a bit empty. I hope they did better over the weekend. Not many red dots were visible when I was there.

The 85 exhibitors came from Mexico, the United States, England, Spain, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Canada, Switzerland, Costa Rica, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Chile and Denmark.

After two days of roaming through the stands, my general impression was of good overall quality but a very bland show: nothing outstanding, nothing exciting. Everyone seemed to be playing it safe or perhaps the work presented the general state of affairs in contemporary artistic output. Whichever the case, there was a large amount of very good photography in large formats. 

Very few paintings were exhibited, with the exception of the Drexel Gallery from Monterrey who always comes to the fairs with very good, large paintings by Daniel Lezama, Armando Romero, Maribel Portela, Ruben Rosas and Reynaldo Diaz Zesati.

The OMR Gallery had a very large, strangely divided space with works by a selection of their artists, including last year’s Venice Biennale sensation, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Candida Höfer’s large C-prints of palace interiors and baroque monuments were particularly arresting.

The Nina Menocal Gallery had some very interesting work by Carlos Aguirre consisting of layered digital photo work on transparent sheets over light boxes, entitled “Serie Usual Suspect, 2006.”

The London-based Albion Gallery had several interesting photographs of Jaume Piensa’s eco-inspired installation sculptures, taken by Ed Reeve.

The Galería de Arte Mexicano (GAM) never disappoints. Along with their collection of mid-twentieth-century Mexican masterworks by Gunther Gerzso and Francisco Toledo, they showed some wonderful pieces by Mary Stuart, Jan Hendricks, Irma Palacios and Paula Santiago.

The Monterrey/New York Ramis Barquet Gallery didn’t do it for me this year, aside from a small Bethsabee Romero work. The Bonelli Arte Contemporanea from Mantua, Italy, had a lovely work by Kim Dorland: “Winter Walk,” oil and acrylic on wood. The Galleria Massimo De Carlo had small, not-so-great works by a significant list of artists such as John Armleder, Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Ettore Spalletti and Laurence Weiner.

Our own Kunsthaus gallery space, listed under Miami, was in a small, side-hall stand, but was generating a lot of buzz. By noon after the opening, they had sold seven small oils by Rocìo Maldonado (who wasn’t even listed in the catalogue), had taken several orders for Daniela Edburg’s digital impressions and as I walked away from their stand, were explaining the creative process of a fantastic sculpture by Ana Quiroz of glass shards and tortoise shell. The collectors, one couple from Monterrey and a lady from Germany, were seriously interested. By Thursday afternoon, their costs had been covered and there were still three and half days to go!

The Mexico City Gallery of the new super stars, the Kurimanzutto Gallery, brought many less than exciting works by Miguel Calderon, Damian Ortega and Gabriel Orozco. One of my favorite works shown was in the Prometeo Gallery of Ida Pisani of Lucca and Milan. She showed video photographs printed in large format of performance pieces by the Guatemalan artist Regina Josè Galindo. Galindo won the Golden Lion award in the 51st edition of the Venice Biennale and is highly admired and collected in Europe although still relatively unknown in Mexico. Using her own body (reminiscent of Ana Mendietes), this artist performs work depicting female torture in South American dictatorships and violence against women in general. Large photo stills are created from the performances and in spite of the subject matter, the shots chosen are always aesthetically pleasing.

The stateside galleries, mostly from NewYork were an uninteresting group to say the least.

The one oriental gallery from Japan came with a few small, decorative works. Perhaps next year we can look forward to art from China. Several of the exhibitors were planning to show in the upcoming Shanghai Art Fair. We can hope they will take a better selection of art than that brought to Mexico this year.

Margaret Failoni is an independent curator and art historian who has lived in San Miguel for 13 years. She curates exhibitions of contemporary art for museums, public spaces and some galleries in Mexico after a full-time career in Rome, Italy.

Celebrate your mother

Community Art Project
Compiling Thoughts
Akiko Yasuda
Fri, May 9, 3:30–7pm
Collages and Thoughts Exhibition
Sat, May 10, 10am–2pm
Biblioteca Pública

Akiko Yasuda will hold an artistic event dedicated to all mothers on the weekend of Mother’s Day. The event is a physical compilation of thoughts about mothers on May 8 and May 9 in the courtyard of the Biblioteca Pública. Yasuda will then present the collage with the thoughts of all the participants and work done for the students on May 10.

This project, inspired by Yasuda’s extensive work for “San Kyu” art, holds to the concept of creating more beautiful, translating thoughts into different forms as a part a community piece. Your piece of papel chino becomes a commemoration of the many creations we receive from various mothers, such as our Mother Earth and the most important and beloved by human beings—our mother.

Akiko Yasuda is an artist and teacher and may be contacted at martesartes@gmail.com.