Mexico City’s Zona Maco to Bring Together 241 Exhibitors Next Month

Next month, Zona Maco, one of Latin America’s top fairs, will alight in Mexico City, bringing together droves of collectors to Centro Banamex, on the outskirts of the capital city for the fair along will several satellites.

The fair will take place during the same time as the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar, but the conflict doesn’t seem to have impacted Zona Maco, which said it has 50 museum board groups confirmed to attend during the event running from February 4–8.

The upcoming iteration will bring together 241 exhibitors across nine sections, several of which focus mainly on modern and contemporary art. There are also sections for design, books, and antiquities.

The fair’s main section will include 66 exhibitors, such as Pace Gallery, Galleria Continua, Sean Kelly, Mariane Ibrahim, Carl Freedman Gallery, Livia Benavides, and A Lighthouse Called Kanata, alongside some of Mexico’s top galleries like Kurimanzutto, OMR, Proyectos Monclova, Labor, Curro, and Galería Karen Huber.

“We’re very excited because each year it gets more interesting—you think you’ve done it all, and then something new happens,” Zélika García, the fair’s founder, told ARTnews.

One of those new happenings comes in the form of a section called Forma, which will be staged for the first time at the 2026 fair. Located within the larger contemporary art section, Forma will host six galleries, who were invited to participate. They include Carpenters Workshop Gallery, Santiago’s Collectio, São Paulo’s Dobra, and Amsterdam’s Rademakers Gallery.

García said that these galleries didn’t quite fit within the contemporary art or design sections, as they often mix both within their respective programs and art-fair booths. “I think it was needed,” she said. “We didn’t have a special place where to fit in the fair, and now this year we have it. This year, it’s six but with time, if this goes well, it can grow a little more.”

Another change comes in the design section, which consists of 79 exhibitors and focuses primarily on designers from across Mexico. “Our fair is very different because you see design that you don’t see in other fairs, like those in Paris or the US,” García said, noting that several of Mexico’s top design universities are invited to bring sellable products from their students and its section for emerging designers is aimed at showcasing rising talents without gallery representation or large studios via one single product that has no more than an area of one square meter.

The Diseño Emergente (Emerging Design) section this year will include 48 of the 79 design exhibitors and it will move to a different part of the Centro Banamex and will be organized in a cohesive exhibition, as opposed to separate stands, by the Design section’s artistic director, Cecilia León de la Barra, along with Mexican designers Joel Escalona and Jorge Diego Etienne.

The Ejes section, for emerging contemporary artists, will also see its floorplan revised. This year’s iteration will be curated by Aimé Iglesias Lukin, the director and chief curator of the Americas Society in New York, for the first time and bring together 35 exhibitors, including Kates-Ferri Projects, Linse, Mesa Pictures, and Murmurs.

The other main curated section, Sur, for artists from the southern hemisphere, will be curated for third and final time by Manuela Moscoso, the executive and artistic director of CARA in New York. The section’s 17 galleries include K Contemporary, Galería Patricia Ready, Palo Gallery, and Stems Gallery.

“We change the curators in different sections every two or three years so that the sections are always fresh,” García said. “It’s important for us to try and be different from other fairs, to keep the mix of very blue-chip galleries with the emerging and mid-career artists at the same time.”

For the past few years, the international art market has been on somewhat of a downward turn or correction, which seemed to rebound slightly at the end of last year. García said that the 2025 edition of Zona Maco was a huge success. “We didn’t feel that market low. I think it came a little bit later,” she said, noting that this year also looks fortuitous as the fair has 50 museum board groups slated to attend the 2026 edition. “I’m very happy with our timing [in February] if things remain the same because we heard from the Miami fairs that the market is up again.”

She added, “Mexican collectors have always been very supportive of the fair. I think they like having the most important art fair in Latin America in Mexico, so they support the galleries that come from abroad during Zona Maco. They buy from the Mexican galleries all year, so I think they take special care to buy from international galleries. And the international museum groups like to buy from Mexican galleries because they are in Mexico, so it’s a good exchange.”

The full exhibitor list follows below.

Main Section

Sur

Arte Moderno

Ejes

Forma

Diseño (Design)

Diseño Emergente (Emerging Design)

Salón del Anticuario

Foto (Photography)