The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (MARCO) opens on November 7, 2026 the exhibition Cuerpo, performance y acción: obras de la colección Hirmas, with 71 works by 46 artists and two collectives that survey six decades of performance and action art.
The show brings together for the first time in public the collection that Rocío and Boris Hirmas began assembling some twenty years ago, with guidance from curator Osvaldo Sánchez. El Universal ranks the collection among the most important in contemporary art in Mexico, and pieces from it have been shown at the Museo Reina Sofía, at the Venice Biennale and at the Museo de Arte Moderno. For northeastern Mexico, the exhibition broadens the contemporary art offering and gives the public access to a body of work that previously circulated in private circuits and international fairs.
The curatorship is by Virginie Kästel, with assistance from Sofía Benutto, and the show occupies Room 5 of the venue. The route is chronological and brings together photography, video, painting, sculpture and documents; several pieces are exhibited for the first time. The list includes Marina Abramović, Ana Mendieta, Yves Klein, Vito Acconci, Carolee Schneemann, VALIE EXPORT, Teresa Margolles, Carlos Amorales, Tercerunquinto and the Danish collective SUPERFLEX. Boris Hirmas told Excélsior that "the mere body, without so much artifice, is enough to express powerful ideas."
The exhibition's themes are the dependence between the body and its surroundings, the use of the body as a tool of confrontation, and the memory of ephemeral actions that survive in photographic and video records. MARCO's director, Taiyana Pimentel, described the project as a discipline of collecting post-conceptual practices. The installation includes photographs documenting actions from the 1960s and 1970s, alongside more recent pieces.
The exhibition runs until April 4, 2027, according to the museum's official page, and opens MARCO's year-end season with a calendar that extends into the first quarter of 2027.
This article was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence from verified sources and reviewed by a human editor before publication.
