Discover Highlights from Zona Maco 2026

Mexico City is on everyone’s lips. The creative metropole is among many collectors’s top destinations, or even in their plans for a new chapter in life. For those curious to explore what the Mexican capital of layered cultural history has to offer, perhaps no time is more ideal than its annual Art Week, which is anchored by Zona Maco art fair. Running until February 8 at Centro Citibanamex, this year’s 22nd edition radiates with the city’s vibrant, colorful, and experimental soul, serving as a crash course on the diverse artistic practices Mexico has to offer.

The fair, which exhibits over 220 galleries from around 25 countries, also proves the demand of a growing local art market “Local collectors are deeply engaged, intellectually curious, and increasingly involved in supporting artists beyond acquisition, including production and long-term development,” the fair’s artistic director, Direlia Lazo, tells Galerie. “For us, that relationship extends well beyond the days of the fair.”

Visitors don’t need to look further than just outside the fairgrounds to catch a glimpse of the cutting-edge contemporary art on view, including that at collector-run institutions such as Museo Jumex and Museo Tamayo. In addition, long-standing institutions such as the Museum of Mexico City and Palacio de Bellas Artes contextualize diversity of pre-Colombian art and craft with connections to its modern day reflections through critical perspectives. Lazo agrees on her city’s status as a “cultural capital” but adds that “what’s really changed over the last decade is the scale and connectivity of its art ecosystem.” She notes that her fair has “played an active role” in this transformation, “helping to professionalize the market and create sustained connections between galleries, collectors, institutions, and the international art world.”

The show proves Lazo’s sentiment. With a growing connection between local and global galleries, the fair offers visitors the opportunity to bounce between international powerhouses and homegrown fixtures. For the overlap of two, take Kurimanzutto, the Mexico City-born gallery with a New York outpost and an eclectic roster. Abraham Cruzvillegas, who has been a core figure in the gallery’s formation, is represented at the booth with A new untitled self-built Neo-Plasticist, Neo Concrete & Neo-Geo genealogical, genetic & geopolitical map (2025), a new iteration of his blind self-portraits series in which the artist maps his daily musings, thoughts, and routines through configurations of mundane materials. Here, sentimental value is added to the process as Cruzvillegas appropriates wooden parts from his father’s oil paintings from the 1980s and paints them with colorful abstractions. Kurimanzutto’s sales director, Malik Al Mahrouky, sees the fair week as the perfect opportunity to harness the relationships they build in New York. “We can bring our collectors from the U.S. to artist studios, talks, and to visit our main gallery here to provide context and another panorama,” he says, adding that “there is no fair like Zona Maco in terms of the quality of its satellite events.”

Another local tastemaker, Proyectos Monclova gallery brings to its booth a medley of geographies with artists hailing from Cuba, Bolivia, the U.S., Germany, Brazil, and, of course, Mexico. The capital’s vibrant water-covered town, Xochimilco, with its colorful boats and vibrant street sellers, is the inspiration for Alejandra Venegas’s paintings, in which energetic brushstrokes recall the town’s rapid water stream. Another local painter, Hilda Palafox, plays with dimension and theatricality in Paisaje onírico (2026), a painting of two female figures connected through tear-like ropes blossoming from their eyes in a trompe-l’oeil effect.

Lazo underlines the fair’s positioning “less as a single annual moment and more as a platform within that ecosystem.” She considers the affair “a meeting point where different generations, practices, and geographies converge, reflecting both the city’s historical depth and its contemporary energy within a global context.” Take New Yorker powerhouse Sean Kelly gallery’s return to the fair with a who’s who outing, which includes the likes of Jose Dávila, Marina Abramović, Julian Charrière, Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola, James Casebere, Ana González, Laurent Grasso, and Wu Chi-Tsung. Fitting for the city of Frida Kahlo, Abramović’s black and white self-portrait shows the grand dame of performance art disarmed, surrounded by flowers, staring at the sky while a brittle tree emerges from behind. Dávila’s signature lexicon, in which tension and gentleness coexist, echoes in a new sculpture in which a rock is sandwiched between industrial steel beams, painted in unexpectedly pastel hues of pink and orange. The Mexican artist’s pairing of sleekness with a sturdy elegance is similarly felt in Casebere’s photograph of a wall in a similar shade of orange. Washed with light and darkness at the same time, the corner of a courtyard appears surreal and otherworldly in the photographer’s handling of the subject matter.

Another global force, Pace Gallery, joins the show with a solo presentation dedicated to New York painter Kylie Manning’s vibrant works, which she created in response to her formative experience of growing up between Alaska and Mexico. The ecological and visual diversities between the two places both clash and coalesce in Manning’s turbulent abstractions, in which earthy and lit tones create effects of wind, terrain, and weightlessness. The gallery director Simone Shields is thrilled to be returning to the fair and the city, which she calls a “true hub for inspiration” that she enjoys for its “magnetic cultural scene.” She also notes that it is one of the cities that artists can’t wait to return to, as well as collectors.

Beloved local establishment Galería Karen Huber stands out with an energetic selection of sought-after painters, including Lucía Vidales, Allan Villavicencio, Othiana Roffiel, Andrew Holmquist, and Christian Camacho. Vidales’s oil on linen paintings with a spectral effect joins Villavicencio’s similarly enigmatic abstraction of morphing motifs. Roffiel on the other hand, flirts with corporality in her powdery paintings, while Camacho leans towards architectural geometry with a textured painting of a building from the city’s vibrant Santa Maria la Ribera neighborhood.

Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, which has locations in Chicago and Paris in addition to Mexico City, sets the case for the city’s particular global outlook. Ibrahim says her gallery’s presence in the city “has long been shaped by the local cultural vitality, serving as a foundation of our practice even before establishing a physical location.” The booth is a testimony for the dealer’s remark. Clotilde Jiménez, ruby onyinyechi amanze, Raphaël Barontini, José Gamarra, Salah Elmur, Peter Uka, Maïmouna Guerresi, and Leasho Johnson are among the local and international artists who build a statement around identity, self-making, and memory.

Uruguayan artist Gamarra’s moody painting L’Affrontement (2022) depicts a first aid boat sailing through a lush scenography while Jiménez’s collage painting Niña con su muñeca (2025) constructs a meditation on remembrance and perseverance in the Mexico City-based Hawaiian artist’s signature style of blending cutouts of photographs, paintings, and colorful paper. “We are particularly interested in contributing to this energy through our focus on diversity and inclusion, foregrounding the complex histories of the diaspora in Mexico,” adds Ibrahim about extending her gallery’s mission to a fair context.

Zona Maco is open through February 8, 2026.