The Best Booths at Zona Maco 2026

One of Zona Maco’s best moments comes in the form of a solo booth to Patricio Tejedo. Because this is the Mexico City–based artist’s first time exhibiting at the fair, he wanted to show different bodies of works, providing a compelling look at this young artist’s career so far. Tejedo uses only natural materials, from beeswax to volcanic stone to marble.

Two works show a set of candles resting on pieces of marble in front of an unprimed linen canvas. During the preview, one set of candles was lit. In between each candle was another marble block containing a mineral (salt for one, uncut emeralds for another) and a line of of white down the center. This line wasn’t made from any kind of paint but from the dust of marble pieces that Tejedo has mixed with water.

That approach also informs a large-scale work by Tejedo that takes over two walls of the booth. To make it, he crushes up tezontle, a type of red volcanic rock common in Mexico, and from that uses the resulting sediment to create what he sees as landscape pieces. “I love nature and want to show what Mexico gives us,” Tejedo said of his practice.

A different kind of natural material animates the work of Karla Ekaterine Canseco: petroleum. Her interest in petroleum stems from the outsize influence the substance has had over world history. Not only does petroleum carry geopolitical concerns in how world powers fight over it and exploit countries that are rich in it—look no further than developing Venezuela and US relations—but ecological ones, too, as its burning plays a decisive role in the climate crisis. Canseco imbues petroleum into her sculptures that continue a mythology of her own making in which human, dog, and machine are one in the same. In this world, everything becomes a vessel in which organic and inorganic materials—blood, iron, plastic, petroleum—collide.

Natural materials are also the focus of two artists, Nicolás Bonilla and María Roldán, presented by the Bogotá-based SGR Galería. Bonilla, who self-describes as an artist and a geologist, is interested in archiving the earth’s sediment by mixing different recipes of minerals and firing them at various temperatures to create cone-like sculptures that measure a few inches. He displays these by color in large grids, intermixed with pieces of glass, itself a decomposed form of earth via silica. In indexing these sediments, Bonilla creates a record of the passage of time. Similarly, María Roldán pairs blown glass with various rocks to present the coexistence of disparate materials. Roldán draws these rocks from waterways, which have had a direct role in shaping the form of rocks over the passage of time. To make her sculptures, Roldán fits her made glass to almost interlock with the rocks.

On view in Curro’s booth is a massive installation by artist Alejandro Almanza Pereda, which consists of various works by the artist. All of these take the form of terracotta vessels, which the artist has filled with concrete, often breaking off sections to expose their now-filled innards. In a way, these vessels have now been rendered useless, holding materials that are now inextricable from their containers.

The felling of monuments is the focus of several works by Lucia Tallová on view in Zilberman Gallery’s booth. On the floor are fragments of Doric columns into which the artist has incised large-scale, black-and-white photographic reproductions of various marble statues depicting Venus. Part of her series titled “Unstable Monuments,” these works include tender mixed-media collages and consider what monuments represent and the many instances when it’s necessary to break them down, to create something new from their remains. Tallová’s concerns here are mostly focused on how the male gaze has dictated the representation of women, like Venus, who often tries to hide her nudity, across centuries of art history. This objectification is something that must be done away with, Tallová argues.

São Paulo–based Galeria Lume has titled its presentation “Before It Fades,” presenting the work of four artists whose practice think through memory and its inherent fragility. Two artists in this timely booth stand out: Hal Wildson and Osvaldo Gaia. Wildson presents various arrangements of white tiles onto which he has printed a map of Latin America in red, inside of which he has reproduced images of protests across Latin America. Accompanying it are documents that detail instances of US intervention in Latin America. Beneath one example, several of these tiles have fallen to the ground. But the white tiles they are printed onto are, in fact, rectangular erasers, a nod to how the US government has often tried to obfuscate—if not erase—its involvement in the various coups in Latin America during the 20th century. The presentation is poignant in 2026, following the Trump administration’s intervention in Venezuela.

Mariane Ibrahim has operated a gallery in Mexico City since 2023, and for the gallery’s first appearance at the city’s fair since 2020, it’s assembled a group show of artists from the roster. The highlight here is a preview, of sorts. In the fall, Ibrahim will mount a solo show at here CDMX space for José Gamarra, an octogenarian artist who has lived in Paris since the 1960s, in exile from Uruguay. Ibrahim is showing two recent paintings by the artist (one from 2022, one from 2025), but her goal is to show how Gamarra has been making work for decades that indict imperialism and neo-colonialism. The work, she said, “could not be more contemporary than it is now.” One striking painting shows two Indigenous figures in a boat looking out at the arrival of a Spanish conquistador’s ship.

Hashimoto Contemporary, which has spaces in New York and San Francisco, has on view a trio of painters in its booth, offering different aesthetic approaches. Santa Fe–based artist Madeleine Tonzi offers abstracted landscapes of the desert, which are often framed in the body of a swan. Observe closely the skill used to depict the gradient of a Southwest sky at dawn. Carlos Rodriguez offers tender portraits of himself with his partner and members of his queer community. The tour de force here are the enigmatic paintings of Angela Burson, who depicts everything but her subject’s faces. In her tableaux are hidden Easter eggs that add to the mystery of these open-ended narratives. My favorite is Night Train (2026), in which a couple sits at a café. The woman has removed a shoe and from her ring, she drops some kind of powder into a cup of coffee on the table.