How Latin American Artists Have Harnessed The Allure Of Alchemy

At the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, a major exhibition is using alchemy to map a larger history of Latin American art.“Constellations and Drifts: Art from Latin America in the FEMSA Collection” brings together 170 works by 115 artists from the FEMSA Collection, and it remains on view through August 9, 2026.

The show arrives as the collection marks its 50th anniversary, giving the presentation a retrospective weight without turning it into a simple survey. Instead, co-curators Eugenia Braniff, Paulina Bravo, Beto Díaz Suárez, and Adriana Melchor have organized the exhibition around five thematic“constellations,” each one opening a different route through the collection.

The most resonant of those sections is devoted to alchemy. Braniff describes the theme as emerging from the region's long cultural fusion: pre-Columbian religious and artistic traditions layered with four centuries of Spanish colonial influence. In the exhibition, alchemy becomes less a historical curiosity than a language for transformation - spiritual, material, and political.

That idea is carried across more than 80 years of work. The section includes Roberto Matta's Edulis (1942) and Juan O'Gorman's Boschian's Los mitos (1944), then moves forward to Isa Carrillo's 2024 thread-and-fabric works, whose stitched forms suggest coded systems and shifting meanings. Nearby are Leonor Fini's La guardiana del huevo negro (1955) and Remedios Varos's Papilla estelar (1958), both of which frame metamorphosis through Surrealist imagery.

Braniff also points to the historical role of Latin America as a refuge for European Surrealists fleeing World War II, including Leonora Carrington, Kati Horna, and Fini. In that context, alchemy takes on a distinctly regional inflection. Mexican Surrealists, she said, often understood themselves less as Surrealists in the European sense than as alchemists working within a local tradition of spiritual and material change.

The exhibition also includes works by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, Francis Alÿs, and a new special commission by Ad Minoliti, underscoring the collection's range from canonical modernism to contemporary practice. Lesser-seen works by Alice Rahon add another layer, expanding the story beyond the most familiar names.

Taken together, the exhibition suggests that alchemy in Latin American art is not merely a motif. It is a method for thinking about how images, histories, and identities are remade over time - and why that process still feels urgent in the present.

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