Guadalajara Roundup

Art people in Mexico City have long insisted that Guadalajara is happening. The city is the third largest in Mexico after Monterrey, both longstanding centers of culture from which a lot of great music, architecture, and literature has emerged. But even though Mexico’s first contemporary art fair, Expo Arte Guadalajara, took place in Guadalajara in 1992, and the first edition of México Arte Contemporáneo (ZONA MACO) opened in Monterrey, contemporary art has tended to stay firmly put in Mexico City—where ZONA MACO has been based since 2003, and to which Guadalajaran artists have historically had to move in order to grow their careers.

But it seems things are changing. During the fifth Guadalajara Art Week this year, MAZ Museo de Arte de Zapopan opened “Sinfonía industrial en dos tiempos” (Industrial Symphony in Two Movements), curated by local gallery guadalajara90210. That the museum is independent of the cash-strapped Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura—managed by Mexico’s Ministry of Culture—was evident in the ambition of a group show comprising significant works by twenty-one national and international artists, many of them new commissions. The theme of the show was, however, a bit flimsy. Loosely inspired by David Lynch’s 1990 concert film Industrial Symphony No.1: The Dream of the Broken Hearted, it purported to bring together the coldness of the industrial with the softness of the emotional and the organic. It’s the type of ornamental dialectical dynamic adopted by so many group shows nowadays (“What if this, but also this?”), but I did not begrudge it, because the selection was good.

An early highlight was Naomi Rincón-Gallardo’s Ella que Muerde y Toca (She who bites and touches, 2026), a remarkable sculpture of a humanoid bust with robotic elements. Her face, under a shaggy black wig, was open and monstrous: a wooden oval with two round holes for eyes filled with a reflective purple material; a vagina dentata mouth with semi-precious crystal teeth surrounding a phone screen showing a video of an aggressive tongue. In Rincón-Gallardo’s video work, sculptures function as props and costumes which she often exhibits alongside, a methodology that has influenced other local artists (Paloma Contreras Lomas comes to mind). This piece marked a development for the artist, by succinctly integrating the humor, aggression, and materiality of her videos.

In the same room was Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s Arpa (Harp, 2026), the second-largest piece of hers to be shown in the country, a significant fact for an artist known outside of Mexico for her monumental paintings.1 Made entirely from stretched canvases, Arpa was a strange beast: its coffin-sized, prism-shaped base was adorned with representations of ultrasounds of different uterine conditions—one of them looked like an evil eye opening in the dark, another one like a bat haunting a cave under the phrase “ABSOLUTE FREEDOM.” An inverted horseshoe—or a harp, of course—was painted with squiggly cables reaching a big white plug in the middle. Toranzo Jaeger’s painterly logic, although oriented by her critique of patriarchal, techno-capitalist power, can be so maximalist as to be convoluted. Here, I enjoyed the zany juxtaposition of the obvious pun of female/male plugs with the hardships of reproduction, and our addiction to escapist fantasies, entertainment, and pretty things. At the end of the show, Michel Blazy’s Fontaine (2026) was more lighthearted. Ten large trash cans were stacked on the wall in a pyramid formation, producing an endless cascade of thick, glistening, soapy foam, threatening to fill the entire room.

A subterranean parking lot at La Perla, a generic suburban mall, hosted a show organized by the two-person art collective En lo que featuring pieces by twenty-four younger artists. Finding this former office space, complete with eerie booths and cubicles, was like entering a sequel to Backrooms (2026). Fer Llano’s Untitled I (Sobre un Pato Donald que explotó en el desfile de Macy’s en 1984 y un narcobloqueo en Jalisco) (Untitled [About a Donald Duck that exploded during the Macy’s Parade in 1984 and a narco-blockade in Jalisco], 2026) reminded me of the recent time when Mexican artists, engrossed in reexaminations of vernacular modernisms and anything related to the CIA, became obsessed by a 2018 reprint of the 1971 book How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. Indeed, the whole show suggested that this generation are the children of post-internet art: Should we call them post-post-internet artists?

A highlight was Actos de fe (Acts of Faith, 2026) by the Mayami Boyz, a duo from Mérida, that included a dinosaur toy tied by its neck to a caguama and forced to walk in circles (making delightful markings on the floor), a plastic bag from Farmacias Guadalajara floating like a parachute over a floor fan, a holographic poster of Dragon Ball, and a fork forced into a power outlet. More earnestly, I loved Vico Valle’s El espejo sigue sin ser reflejo (The Mirror Is Still Not a Reflection, 2026), a small painting showing a pigeon trapped between the natural world and a desktop computer job. Among many memorable gestures were Gabriel Lengeling’s Estela no. 3 (Pastel selva negra del templo mayor) (Stele N. 3 [Templo Mayor Forest Cake], 2026), a fake chocolate cake in the shape of a Mexica relic hanging on a wall, and Johnson & Jeison’s dakimakura installation Bareback en el monte (Bareback in the Hill, 2026).

Two exhibitions at the new space OOO presented works by Norberto Miranda, a local artist who ended up working for Ye’s cultish commune in Calabasas, alongside the results of Picudo, a residency in a rural town called Mascota (Spanish for pet)—for a small art week, these two shows felt like a net positive. While some of the Mexico City art community were once wholehearted Guadalajara denialists, anyone interested in contemporary Mexican art should keep an eye on the city. This is especially true among its younger generation of artists and organizers, who are willing to subvert and expand the more predictable, conservative tendencies of some recent Mexican art. As a coastal creature that moved around and ended up in Mexico City in order to find work, I can appreciate how staying put to create something of one’s own is in itself an act of defiance.