Mexico City’s Galería Hilario Galguera: Snapshot of a City in Motion

From the outside, Galería Hilario Galguera looks like any of the other mansions on its street in Colonia San Rafael – square and flat, with a slightly faded colonial facade and doors in the places where windows usually are. When you step inside, you find a space that is like a house but also several other things – an exhibition space, an office, an architectural riff on the structure of a home. One corner of the foyer is occupied by a fountain set into the floor, which looks very easy to fall into, and on the other side is a set of steps that leads to the main gallery space. 

The gallery was founded by the architect and collector Hilario Galguera in 2006, and over the past decade and a half has made a name for itself as one of Mexico City’s preeminent exhibition spaces – its roster of artists includes Damien Hirst, Enrique Ježik, Athina Ioannou, Francisco Larios, and Amy Feldman, to name just a few. SLEEK toured the gallery and talked to some of the artists and curators involved in it about how Hilario Galguero positions itself within Mexico City’s thriving artistic landscape. 

Whether or not the art scene in Mexico City is currently at a turning point depends on who you talk to. Some people will point out that Mexico’s capital city, which is home to some 20 million people and dates back to before the Aztecs, has, like any great metropolis, always been simultaneously in a process of fossilization and rebirth. It may even be a bit ridiculous to try to talk about there being a single “scene” given the basically incomprehensible scale of human life that happens there, spanning everything from unlicensed Minions merchandise to vanity projects of billionaires like the Soumaya. At least for the past century, Mexico City has been a place where intellectuals, artists, and free thinkers of every stripe have come in the hope of finding political security and autonomy of expression (think Trotskey, Bolano, the Spanish Republicans); it is also the federal seat of a nation that sees ten women and girls murdered every day, near-US levels of income inequality, and swaths of territory effectively under the governance of drug cartels.

But there are a number of undeniable facts about the nature and direction of the changes that the city’s art scene is currently experiencing. Like New York in the 70s or Berlin in the early aughts, a plethora of relatively affordable studio spaces and general quality of life for people who earn money in dollars or pounds or euros has drawn increasingly larger waves of creatives from Europe and the United States, often people who are rich relative to the average inhabitant, and this is fucking with people’s lives. Many people we spoke to described there being a sort of bubble that expats and wealthy Mexicans orbit within that has nothing to do with the lives of everyday citizens except for the purposes of resource and labor extraction – there doesn’t seem to be much reason to expect that an influx of foreign wealth will do anything to make this bubble more porous.

So it seems relatively safe to say that there is at least a turning point for an art scene in Mexico City happening right now. One of the big questions that loom over every scene at a moment of growth is whether something “different” will happen – different not only in the sense of the political and aesthetic ideologies represented within the artworks themselves but in the modes of promotion and valuation of the market within which the art is created. That is, who receives recognition, who determines which artworks are best positioned to become repositories of capital, and to what extent does the latter determine the former? In other words, is it the fate of every growing scene to either follow in the footsteps of New York and London and (sorry) Berlin and become largely subservient to the dictates of neoliberal financialization or to lose the attention (and money) of the art world’s tastemakers?

Sprinkled over the ground floor of Galería Hilario Galguera are paintings and monotypes by the renowned Brazilian artist Rodrigo Andrade (1962), part of a collaboration with Galeria Millan in Sao Paulo. Andrade’s paintings, which are large and bright with visible layers of texture, aren’t representative in any straightforward sense, but they feel more figurative than abstract. There’s an abstraction in the colors, sure – the balance and juxtaposition of the colors hit your cortex way faster than any sort of formulated thought would – but the overall effect of the forms is to draw attention to themselves and their iteration throughout the forty-some works on display. This iteration is the most lasting effect of Andrade’s selection. Why the fascination with these particular shapes? 

The main exhibition area is up the staircase leading off the foyer and unfolds over five rooms, four of which are occupied by inkjet prints by Maisie Cousins (UK, 1992). The central conceit of this set of Cousins’ works is to take subjects that normally seem gross and to complicate that sense into something that also invites adjectives like beautiful and vibrant and lush. This idea is not a particularly radical one, and it doesn’t need to be. Cousins’ works distinguish themselves in the way that their aesthetic force has a way of creating unity out of disparate things – a slug, a microscopic view of veins, a bloody ear, a peeled grape. Here, it’s the creative feat itself that is impressive; the concept behind the execution feels less central to what we enjoy about it.

The third room holds an exhibition of work from four female artists who are currently based in Colonia San Rafael – Lotte Andersen, Tori Pounds, Elvira Smeke, and Cosima Von Moreau. Three of them are British and one is Mexican. The styles range from representational to full abstraction and the materials include acrylic on paper, paper collage, lightjet print on paper, and oil on canvas. It isn’t exactly clear what the selection process for these four particular artists entailed, and for someone coming from Europe or the US, the heavy presence of anglo artists might raise an eyebrow or two. One thing that does seem clear is that Western (read: European and US) notions about diversity and multiculturalism don’t map cleanly onto the value norms of Mexican society, even at its highest echelons. The variety of the works and the range of experimentation are likely a more useful point for attention than what might be seen as a tendency towards geographic homogeneity. 

The combined effect of the calibre of the works and the layout of the space at Hilario Galguera does not fail to impress. As with many compelling experiences of art, we are left with more questions than concrete answers. Is there an outsized presence of European artists relative to Latin American ones? Do the gender and the nationality of the artists represented reflect the prevailing tastes of the collectors that the gallery attracts? Is it sensible to expect an organization whose sustaining function is to turn a profit to challenge or subvert the tastes of its clientele? Are an artist’s biographical details a helpful metric with which to evaluate the quality of their work? And are such identity-based valuations not themselves importations of Western logic and ethics?

As Mexico City’s art scene continues to expand, institutions like Galerie Hilario Galguera will serve as touchstones for the evolution and intersections of the market’s tastes. There is power here, and, perhaps, the capacity to offer some measure of guidance about what happens, about whether something different can actually take place. For the time being that’s all very much up in the air, and it’s thrilling to watch the shapes it takes.