Geles Cabrera’s retrospective at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes brings long-overdue institutional recognition to one of the country’s first modern female sculptors. Spanning seven decades of the artist’s work, the exhibition follows her receipt of the 2024 Bellas Artes Medal in Visual Arts, Mexico’s highest artistic distinction.
Arranged thematically, the exhibition reveals Cabrera’s fluid treatment of the human figure, space and movement through materials ranging from volcanic stone to terracotta and plexiglass. “The exhibition situates Cabrera’s legacy,” says the curator Joshua Dalí Sánchez González. “It places the works in a choreographed, at times ceremonial layout.”
Cabrera, who turns 100 this year, came of age in post-revolutionary Mexico, when Muralism dominated the canon. Instead, her formal training focused her attention on the body’s expressive potential and experimental practices. “Cabrera was a radical artist,” Sánchez says. “She depicted the nude female and male body in a largely conservative society led by male sculptors.”
Her connection with the avant-garde architect Alfonso Pallares—who was inspired by Italian Futurism and led an experimental workshop fusing colour, form and music into dance—was key to Cabrera’s rhythmic, dance-inflected practice. “The 1940s and 50s saw a shift in the understanding of the body, influencing Cabrera’s portrayal of erotism and movement,” Sánchez says.
Installation view of Geles Cabrera: Partituras Corporales at Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes Photo: Gerardo Landa/Eduardo López. Courtesy Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes
Over the decades, Cabrera’s interpretation of the human figure oscillated between figuration and abstraction, synthesising movement, gesture and sensuality. Even stone works, like Pasión Femenina (1979), seem fluid and light, a quality accentuated by the materials’ porosity. The show’s planning involved locating and restoring works including the totem-like Untitled (1965), which for years had remained partially buried in the artist’s garden.
Another highlight is Cabrera’s terracotta series from the 1980s, where influences from Western modernism, Mesoamerican and Afro-Caribbean expressions emerge alongside a spiritual quest. The same holds for her small-scale bronze works, which, through intricate body poses, portray eroticism but also intimacy and vulnerability. The show also includes Cabrera’s experiments with wood and aluminium.
Alongside nearly 100 of Cabrera’s works, the exhibition features archival photographs, including images of a now-lost 1970s public art project in Tabasco created with Ángela Gurría, Mathias Goeritz and other members of the GUCADIGOSE collective. From 1966 until the 1990s, she ran the Museo Escultórico in Coyoacán, exhibiting over 50 works in a sculpture garden.
Installation view of Geles Cabrera: Partituras Corporales at Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes Photo: Gerardo Landa/Eduardo López. Courtesy Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes
“Unable to showcase her work in institutions or enter collections, Geles created an exhibition space, taking Diego Rivera’s Anahuacalli and Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul as references,” Sánchez says. The exhibition revisits this legacy by featuring works by contemporary artists like Paula Cortazar and Madeline Jiménez.
Cabrera’s first solo show was at the progressive Mont-Orendáin Gallery in Mexico City in 1949, though broader recognition came decades 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 at the Museo Experimental El Eco, renewing interest in her practice. That same year, the dealer Agustina Ferreyra began representing Cabrera, who later moved to OMR after Ferreyra closed her gallery and joined OMR in early 2025. In 2022, a solo exhibition at the Americas Society in New York raised her profile internationally.
During Art Week, Cabrera’s legacy will come alive at Bellas Artes as 50 dance students led by the choreographer Diego Vega perform a dance piece inspired by the exhibition in select galleries and on the grand staircase (5-7 February, daily at noon). The inclusion of live dance signals a shift for the very traditional institution and means “the exhibition is also a sensory experience”, Sánchez says.
- Geles Cabrera: Partituras Corporales, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, until 5 April
