LONDON.- For the first time, and as part of its NG200 celebrations, the National Gallery will invite visitors all day every Friday to pay what they like for one of its ticketed exhibitions.

From 10am to 9pm on any Friday until 17 August, you can pay as little as £1 or as much as you’d like to enjoy the critically acclaimed exhibition José María Velasco: A View of Mexico, a celebration of Mexico’s most famous 19th-century painter.

Pay What You Wish tickets can be booked online, on the phone or in person and are available on a first come, first served basis. The Gallery first introduced the scheme for Friday evening openings during the Lucian Freud exhibition, followed by the Frans Hals and After Impressionism exhibitions. This is the first time it has operated throughout the day on Fridays.

'José María Velasco: A View of Mexico' is the first monographic exhibition in the UK devoted to José María Velasco (1840–1912) and presents a unique opportunity to discover this artist. It’s the first-ever exhibition that the National Gallery has dedicated to a historical Latin American artist, and it coincides with the 200th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the UK and Mexico.

The exhibition presents around thirty paintings and drawings, with most from private and public Mexican collections, including 17 from the Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL, Mexico City), Mexico’s leading public museum.

José María Velasco is famed for his monumental paintings of the Valley of Mexico, the area surrounding Mexico City. Painted during decades of tremendous social change, his precise yet lyrical works depict Mexico’s magnificent scenery and rapid industrialisation.

While Velasco, one of Mexico’s most eminent artists, showed work in Europe and the United States during his lifetime and still enjoys great prominence in his home country, he is no longer as well-known abroad. There is no painting by Velasco in a UK public collection and the last large-scale exhibition devoted to him outside Mexico was held almost 50 years ago in San Antonio and Austin, Texas in 1976.

Spanning over 50 years of the artist’s career, 'José María Velasco: A View of Mexico' is divided into six thematic sections that present the artist’s wide-ranging interests and their influence on his art.
Visitors are invited to make links between Velasco’s work and paintings in the Gallery’s collection outside the exhibition, particularly Édouard Manet’s The Execution of Maximilian (1867–8), which depicts the demise of the Austrian emperor, Maximilian I, imposed on Mexico by the French ruler Napoleon III. These will encourage visitors to consider how 19th-century painters outside Europe explored colonialism, industrialisation and the effects of modernity on the natural world.

The exhibition also touches on broader concerns about the relationship between human beings and the environment, seen through the lens of late 19th-century painters who addressed extraordinary ecological change, a theme that still resonates today.

As well as providing a comprehensive introduction to Velasco’s art, the exhibition builds on the National Gallery’s successful strategy over the last 10 years of introducing British audiences to art from beyond Europe and follows exhibitions on Winslow Homer (1836–1910), George Bellows (1882–1925) and the Ashcan painters, Thomas Cole (1801–1848) and Australia’s Impressionists.

The exhibition is curated by artist and independent curator Dexter Dalwood and Daniel Sobrino Ralston, the National Gallery’s CEEH (Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica) Associate Curator of Spanish Paintings, from an initial concept by Dexter Dalwood.

Exhibition organised by the National Gallery, London, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.