Geles Cabrera’s retrospective on the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes brings long-overdue institutional recognition to one of many nation’s first trendy feminine sculptors. Spanning seven many years of the artist’s work, the exhibition follows her receipt of the 2024 Bellas Artes Medal in Visible Arts, Mexico’s highest creative distinction.
Organized thematically, the exhibition reveals Cabrera’s fluid remedy of the human determine, area and motion by supplies starting from volcanic stone to terracotta and plexiglass. “The exhibition situates Cabrera’s legacy,” says the curator Joshua Dalí Sánchez González. “It locations the works in a choreographed, at instances ceremonial structure.”
Cabrera, who turns 100 this 12 months, got here of age in post-revolutionary Mexico, when Muralism dominated the canon. As an alternative, her formal coaching targeted her consideration on the physique’s expressive potential and experimental practices. “Cabrera was a radical artist,” Sánchez says. “She depicted the nude feminine and male physique in a largely conservative society led by male sculptors.”
Her reference to the avant-garde architect Alfonso Pallares—who was impressed by Italian Futurism and led an experimental workshop fusing color, kind and music into dance—was key to Cabrera’s rhythmic, dance-inflected apply. “The Nineteen Forties and 50s noticed a shift within the understanding of the physique, influencing Cabrera’s portrayal of erotism and motion,” Sánchez says.
Set up view of Geles Cabrera: Partituras Corporales at Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes Photograph: Gerardo Landa/Eduardo López. Courtesy Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes
Over the many years, Cabrera’s interpretation of the human determine oscillated between figuration and abstraction, synthesising motion, gesture and sensuality. Even stone works, like Pasión Femenina (1979), appear fluid and lightweight, a top quality accentuated by the supplies’ porosity. The present’s planning concerned finding and restoring works together with the totem-like Untitled (1965), which for years had remained partially buried within the artist’s backyard.
One other spotlight is Cabrera’s terracotta sequence from the Nineteen Eighties, the place influences from Western modernism, Mesoamerican and Afro-Caribbean expressions emerge alongside a religious quest. The identical holds for her small-scale bronze works, which, by intricate physique poses, painting eroticism but additionally intimacy and vulnerability. The present additionally contains Cabrera’s experiments with wooden and aluminium.
Alongside practically 100 of Cabrera’s works, the exhibition options archival images, together with photos of a now-lost Seventies public artwork mission in Tabasco created with Ángela Gurría, Mathias Goeritz and different members of the GUCADIGOSE collective. From 1966 till the Nineteen Nineties, she ran the Museo Escultórico in Coyoacán, exhibiting over 50 works in a sculpture backyard.
Set up view of Geles Cabrera: Partituras Corporales at Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes Photograph: Gerardo Landa/Eduardo López. Courtesy Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes
“Unable to showcase her work in establishments or enter collections, Geles created an exhibition area, taking Diego Rivera’s Anahuacalli and Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul as references,” Sánchez says. The exhibition revisits this legacy by that includes works by up to date artists like Paula Cortazar and Madeline Jiménez.
Cabrera’s first solo present was on the progressive Mont-Orendáin Gallery in Mexico Metropolis in 1949, although broader recognition got here many years later. In 2018, the artist Pedro Reyes—who manages her archive and has loaned works for this exhibition—“rediscovered” her work and organised a survey on the Museo Experimental El Eco, renewing curiosity in her apply. That very same 12 months, the vendor Agustina Ferreyra started representing Cabrera, who later moved to OMR after Ferreyra closed her gallery and joined OMR in early 2025. In 2022, a solo exhibition on the Americas Society in New York raised her profile internationally.
Throughout Artwork Week, Cabrera’s legacy will come alive at Bellas Artes as 50 dance college students led by the choreographer Diego Vega carry out a dance piece impressed by the exhibition in choose galleries and on the grand staircase (5-7 February, each day at midday). The inclusion of reside dance indicators a shift for the very conventional establishment and means “the exhibition can also be a sensory expertise”, Sánchez says.
Geles Cabrera: Partituras Corporales, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico Metropolis, till 5 April
