Lilia Carrillo: Ruptures and Premonitions

Opening at Americas Society on May 13, 2026, Lilia Carrillo: Ruptures and Premonitions, curated by Tobias Ostrander, will introduce the work of Mexican painter Lilia Carrillo through a survey of two dozen of her most accomplished paintings alongside a selection of archival photographs, letters, invitations, and publications.

Lilia Carrillo was a central figure within the group of postwar Mexican painters known as the Generación de la Ruptura (the Rupture Generation), and its most prominent female contributor. Carrillo was part of a close circle of artists including her second husband Manuel Felguérez, Fernando García Ponce, Vlady, Vicente Rojo, and Juan Soriano—who all shared an interest in abstraction and entered into an international dialogue with painterly tendencies occurring in New York and Paris including Abstract Expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction, and Informalism. 

Lilia Carrillo: Ruptures and Premonitions will present a selection of the artist’s paintings from 1961, the year her aesthetic language was consolidated, to 1974, the year before her premature death. The ruptures shaping the presentation include both Carrillo’s association with the Generación de la Ruptura, and her formal interests that challenge the stability of the picture plane and emphasize the physicality of the painted surface. The exhibition will survey the artist’s disruptive gestures of building up thick surfaces that she then carved or scratched into, integrating collaged fabrics or paper fragments into her canvases, smudging her compositions, and using brushes of diverse sizes and other tools to apply and disperse her pigments.

To accompany the exhibition, Americas Society will publish an illustrated catalogue, a monograph on the artist in collaboration with Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, and present the following public programs:

Lilia Carrillo: Ruptures and Premonitions exhibition walkthrough with Tobias Ostrander
Thursday, May 14, 6 to 7pm ET
RSVP 

Book launch: Todo es sugerente, Lilia Carrillo’s exhibition monograph
Wednesday, June 3, 6 to 8pm ET
RSVP 

For more information, please visit artatmericassociety.org. For press inquiries, contact mediarelations@as-coa.org. For general inquiries, contact art@as-coa.org.