Gama Week offers a free weekend to ‘feast your eyes’ on art

Art does not stop in Mexico City when February ends. Gama Week is designed to show that the city’s gallery scene continues throughout the year, with its sixth edition presenting dozens of exhibitions over the first weekend of September.

The event, organized by the GAMA gallery association, follows four routes: San Miguel Chapultepec-Tacubaya, Roma-Condesa, Juárez-Centro and Polanco. Thirty galleries are taking part, giving visitors a free-ranging itinerary through the city’s art spaces.

At Proyecto Paralelo in Juárez, “Salón Varsovia” reimagines the art salons of the 17th century. The gallery has been arranged to resemble someone’s home, with furniture and works forming the exhibition. Visitors are invited to sit, talk, drink coffee or tequila, look closely at the details and browse the books. The gallery’s wall text says, “The disaster of the current world is the loss of conversation,” arguing that fewer interesting ideas emerge from the cross-talk of a salon.

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The disaster of the current world is the loss of conversation.

At Galería Karen Huber, American artist Andrew Holmquist presents “Aguacero,” with vibrant scenes drawn from Mexico City life. His subjects include a face-painting stand in Chapultepec Forest, a landscape in Colonia del Valle, a market stall and a night at a bar. The artist makes his own brushes, giving the paintings their unusual strokes.

Mariane Ibrahim is showing José Gamarra’s desolate landscapes for the first time in Mexico. His paintings depict human intervention in the Amazon, from colonization to the excessive exploitation of natural resources. The gallery describes the exhibition as a continental reading in which the jungle becomes a place from which to read the shared history of the Americas.

Other stops include John Giorno’s first exhibition in Mexico at kurimanzutto; a dynamic show by Lagartijas tiradas al sol at Nordenhake; a dialogue between Francisco Toledo and Jan Hendrix at the Galería de Arte Mexicano; and exhibitions by Studio Lenca and a show curated by Anaïs Lepage at Lago Algo.

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This exhibition proposes a continental reading in which the jungle ceases to belong to a single country and becomes the place from which the shared history of the Americas can be read.