Image: Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City
Museo Tamayo in Mexico City is presenting 'Tamayo Horizontes', an exhibition that brings together paintings by Rufino Tamayo chosen by the artist for the collection that founded the museum, alongside works from private collections. Open from June 10 to September 20, 2026, the show focuses on the horizons of Tamayo’s mature practice, tracing how he continued to refine color, form and pictorial intensity late in life.
According to the museum’s curatorial text, 'Tamayo Horizontes' looks at the classic genres Tamayo worked with across his career: portrait, landscape, nude and still life. Rather than treating those genres as fixed categories, the exhibition presents them as fields in which the artist updated inherited forms for his own time. The museum describes the selection as reflecting Tamayo’s conceptual and technical excellence and his ability to keep producing images that “disconcerted and delighted” viewers even near the end of his life.
The exhibition also foregrounds recurring elements in Tamayo’s painting: references to the pre-Hispanic past and to Mexican popular culture, including toys and fruit; a sustained exploration of color; formal synthesis; expressive density; and a balance of harmony, contrast, symmetry and material richness. The museum’s text emphasizes the playful, ironic and enigmatic qualities that can appear in these compositions, placing them within a broader account of Tamayo’s mature visual language.
'Tamayo Horizontes' includes 'Sandías' from 1968, described by the museum as a key work in Mexican painting from the period, with forms that merge into an atmosphere of color and a near-material surface quality. The exhibition also features 'Hombre en rojo', identified in the museum text as a monumental, machine-like figure linked to references to robotics and space exploration in the 1970s. These works sit within a broader rereading of Tamayo’s late production through his handling of recognisable genres and the shifting possibilities of abstraction and figuration.
The museum’s curatorial text notes that Tamayo was a strong portraitist, though he made relatively few portraits and mainly painted his wife, Olga. It also points to his return to landscape in the early 1960s, when he gave Mexican scenery what the museum calls a poetic simplicity and force. In the nude, Tamayo returned to pre-Hispanic references through stylised figures, while his still lifes moved away from strict figuration toward a more condensed drawing and a freer use of form.
The exhibition is curated by Juan Carlos Pereda. Museo Tamayo’s exhibition listing places 'Tamayo Horizontes' among its current shows, and the museum’s visitor information states that the institution is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. The exhibition is listed with the dates June 10 to September 20, 2026, at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City.
