The Best Booths at Feria Material 2026

At one end of Hall E, Material’s largest space, is Embajada’s booth, which features works by artists from the San Juan Gallery Project, including Claudia Peña Salinas and Georgina Treviño. The latter designed a credit card for Mexican bank Hey Banco; visitors to the materials can register. There is a set of mysterious pictures on the outer wall of the booth. At first glance, some appear to be schematic diagrams of complex machines. In fact, they are movement notations by artist and choreographer Kianí del Valle, who collaborates with famous musicians such as Lorde and Bad Bunny. These incredible drawings don’t reveal much to the untrained eye, but they’re fascinating nonetheless. Above them are two monitors in which del Valle performed some of the works, including her reinterpretations of the hellish parts of Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings.

This Mexico City gallery has two works by Berenice Olmedo, including Amalia (2021), a sculpture composed of the artist joining together various found prosthetics. The artist added motors and sensors to them, causing the sculptures to vibrate at different intervals. Prosthetic limbs used by Olmedo Amalia Originally designed for children, as they grew older these devices were no longer suitable for use, so they became obsolete. hanging on the wall nearby Zelchin (2025), which was commissioned for the artist’s recent exhibition at BAMPFA. Olmedo’s use of prosthetics goes a step further, with the work showcasing a variety of medical instruments—attached surgical steel trauma instruments, aluminum tubing, prosthetic socket adapters—that the artist has connected with resin, giving the tools a tactile quality.

Elián Stolarsky, who was born in Montevideo and now lives in Madrid, presents a fascinating collection of fabric works at the booth of El Chico gallery, also from the Spanish capital. Stolarski is a second-generation member of a family that fled the pogroms in Poland and moved to Uruguay in the 20th century. There is almost no documentation of this family history, but the family history has become the driving force for the artist’s creation. The pieces here are stitched together from a variety of found fabrics and come from an ongoing series titled “País Extraño” (Strange Country). Stolarsky has expanded the scope of the series to investigate conflicts around the world and how they impact global history, as well as the history of a country, a people, or even a family facing displacement. Each work, some of which measure over six feet, is embedded with a drypoint rendering of a photograph taken by Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War. Stolarski seemed to be saying that the moment captured in a single photograph is just one element in a larger historical structure.

Hanging on one wall of the Charlie James Gallery booth is a collection of mixed-media works by the Perez Bros., whose work draws on the Lowrider car shows they attended in Los Angeles during their youth. From a distance, it looks like the artists extracted a neat square or rectangle from the Lowrider’s hood. But in fact, they’ve done tender acrylic paintings that appear to have been made with graphite or ballpoint pen, automotive glitter, and epoxy. Yellow work titled Sick Man C4 (2025-26), a group of men admire a convertible with Felix the Cat, the mascot of a Los Angeles Chevrolet dealership, grinning nearby. my favorite is 4 life (2025) takes the brothers’ lifelong devotion to cars to a visual extreme, featuring a cackling skeleton in the driver’s seat.

Cimbra is a traveling curatorial project from Oaxaca that first started hosting projects in abandoned spaces in 2022. For the first time, it participates in Material’s Proyectos section, which focuses on supporting the work of businesses that highlight contemporary Mexican art. At the fair, Cimbra brought together four Mexican artists for a stunning collective display of minimalism called “Mano de Obra” (Labor Party). All four artists—Blanca Gonzalez, Guadalupe Vidal, Marco Velasco, and Jysus Ramirez—focus on some of Mexico’s most pressing issues, including increasing construction and how it is ultimately destroying the planet. Ramirez addresses this problem through an installation composed of yellow scaffolding from which cardboard figures of construction workers hang precariously. Velasco takes a quieter approach with lamp-like sculptures resembling kettles; they reflect on Oaxaca’s unstable water supply due to poor infrastructure and the current climate crisis.

Entering Hall D of the exhibition, the first thing you see is a pair of stacked pianos. The sculpture pays tribute to composer Erik Satie, whose pile of pianos was discovered in his apartment outside Paris after his death in 1925. Behind this impressive installation is a set of felt wall hangings by Conor Ackhurst that pay homage to the material’s use as a shock absorber and soundproofing material in pianos. These works depict different parts of Sala Nezahualcóyotl, the main concert hall of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and are very fascinating.