Image: Panama Museum of Contemporary Art
MAC Panama will present 'Trixie Briceño: Sistemas de lo maravilloso' from 28 February to 23 August 2026, framing the exhibition as a retrospective survey of Beatrix “Trixie” Briceño, identified by the museum as one of the pioneers of art in Panama. The show will also feature guest artist Ix Shells, whose work is positioned in dialogue with Briceño’s paintings through a generative and immersive installation.
The museum’s exhibition text describes Briceño’s imagery as populated by eggs, glassware, fruits, drawers, arrows, hearts, wheels, cubes, eyes, suns and moons arranged across tables, shelves, interiors, gardens and architectural structures. According to MAC Panama, the exhibition brings together more than fifty paintings from public and private collections, along with archival materials from the museum’s archive, to offer a broad view of Briceño’s production.
Briceño’s life is presented by the museum as central to the visual order of the work. The exhibition text notes that early displacements, migration and political instability shaped her artistic development, including her family’s flight from London to Shanghai during the First World War and later moves between port cities, followed by periods in Panama, Brazil and Arizona. MAC Panama says those conditions helped form a world in which historical time appears fractured and domestic security precarious, and where insistence on order, repetition and emotional containment becomes a visual strategy.
The museum situates Briceño’s practice within surrealism, but emphasizes that it is not treated as a disruptive burst of dream imagery. Instead, the exhibition text characterizes her work as a “silent method” for reaching deeper layers of human experience, using condensations, displacements and inversions to produce forms that escape rational logic. It also reads her use of recurring domestic objects as a way of translating large questions — origin, desire, time, pain and knowledge — into a smaller scale, where a glass measures presence, a drawer holds the repressed, and a table becomes a ritual surface.
MAC Panama further highlights the role of repetition, axial balance, flat chromatic fields and serial arrangements in Briceño’s paintings. In the exhibition account, tears fall inward, arrows point to the heart and fragmented figures appear without drama, integrating into the same visual system as the surrounding objects. Time is reorganized through suns, moons, cycles and recurrence, while play, including dolls and bicycles, appears as a regulated movement rather than spontaneous release.
The invited artist, Ix Shells, is set to respond to this body of work with a second system that activates and expands Briceño’s universe. The museum says the installation will be built from data extracted from Briceño’s work and biography — including life cycles, narrative fragments, chromatic decisions, formal gestures and compositional patterns — processed algorithmically to create a dynamic constellation of light and sound. MAC Panama adds that this intervention continues research Shells began at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Denmark and in the project 'No Me Olvides' at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025.
According to the museum, the exhibition is conceived as a space where memory, perception and time remain in motion rather than being fixed in archival form. MAC Panama lists the venue at Calle San Blas, Ancón, with opening hours from Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and identifies the exhibition dates as 28 February to 23 August 2026.
