Mexico City’s Zona Maco Fair Continues to Draw Upbeat Crowds and Eager Buyers
Latin America’s foremost art fair, now in its 24th year, remains a magnet for collectors, curators and museum groups from across the Western Hemisphere and beyond
By Benjamin Sutton | The Art Newspaper | February 6, 2026
Mexico City’s hulking Centro Banamex convention centre is once again hosting the Zona Maco fair (until 8 February), and though the geopolitical turbulence in the Western Hemisphere is felt—in conversations in the aisles, and on some stands’ walls—the atmosphere during Wednesday’s preview and Thursday’s opening day was buoyant. The addition of the concurrent Art Basel Qatar fair to the increasingly congested international art market calendar has done little to detract from the turnout of collectors, curators and museum groups from the Americas, as well as from Europe.
“One of the first sales we made was to a lovely couple we’d never met before who were here with a museum group from Munich,” says Sean Kelly, whose eponymous New York-based gallery is showing a group of works by artists including Marina Abramović, Kehinde Wiley, Janaina Tschäpe, Ana González. They are priced between $20,000 and $300,000. Kelly noted the presence at the fair of “a lot of Americans trying to escape both the weather and the idiot in the White House”.
Kelly added that one of the fair’s strengths is that, even amid the boisterous crowd energy, he and his team are able to have long, in-depth conversations with visitors. “We had a prominent New York curator on the stand for an hour and a half [on Wednesday]—if we were at any other fair, that would never happen.”
Teófilo Cohen, a director at the influential Mexico City gallery Proyectos Monclova, concurs. “This fair is different from every other fair—it’s not all the same international galleries showing the same thing every year,” he says. “People come here because they want to discover something new.”
Ceramic sculptures by Víctor Hugo Pérez on Proyectos Monclova’s stand at Zona MacoPhoto: Ramiro Chaves, courtesy of Proyectos Monclova
The Proyectos Monclova stand includes, among other works, a series of dystopian, science-fiction tinged paintings by the Havana-based artist Brenda Cabrera, intricate gouache and pencil compositions on wood by the Mexico City-born artist Circe Irasema and a wall of ceramic sculptures by the Guadalajara-based artist Víctor Hugo Pérez. “Victor has been working with traditional ceramic processes from Guadalajara that are disappearing,” Cohen says. The sculptures, contemporary reinterpretations of pre-Hispanic vases and figures of dogs and cats, are priced between $3,000 and $6,000.
Ceramics and, more broadly, works foregrounding material techniques feature prominently throughout Zona Maco this year. “There’s a very strong response to materiality at Zona Maco, which is quite distinct,” Kelly says.
Among the exhibitors tapping into that predilection is Kouri + Corrao, a gallery based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is showing works by two artists specialised in textiles—Karen Hampton and Kendall Ross—and two specialised in ceramics—Raven Halfmoon and Joon Hee Kim. Prices on the stand range from $500 for Ross’s hand-knitted underwear emblazoned with pointed and political slogans to $40,000 for Hampton’s large mixed-media woven works incorporating dyes made from plants she grows herself.
“Most of the artists we work with make art about identity and push the boundaries of their media,” says Justin Kouri, a managing partner at the Kouri + Corrao. He adds that the gallery made several sales during Wednesday’s VIP preview and that overall “the energy is strong” at the fair.