NEW YORK, NY.- Throckmorton Fine Art will present A Century of Abstraction in Mexican Photography, a nuanced exhibition exploring how Mexico’s most iconic photographers utilized abstraction to break free from the creative constraints of nationalism and enter a broader, international dialogue. On view from July 16 through September 26, 2026, the exhibition features more than 40 works dating from 1924 to 2013. It highlights masterpieces by Mexican luminaries such as Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Flor Garduño, and Graciela Iturbide, alongside celebrated expatriates Tina Modotti and Edward Weston, who famously collaborated there.

For generations, Mexican artists and writers devoted their careers to documenting a distinct national identity. However, a worldly group of photographers, wary of being pigeonholed by identity politics, found liberation in abstraction. A Century of Abstraction in Mexican Photography highlights this creative bravery while simultaneously exploring a fascinating paradox: that formalism in Mexican photography remained deeply embedded in a sense of time and place.

Spanning nearly a century, the works reveal how Mexico—as both a geographical reality and an "imagined" community—structured this unique aesthetic, ranging from the epic abstractions of master photographers who transformed rugged desert cacti into striking geometric forms, and captured fleeting, abstract patterns formed by butterflies and birds taking flight.

While the artists in this exhibition share no single style, recurring motifs—cacti, power lines, flowers, rocks, and hands—suggest a collective desire to look closely at the familiar and discover the extraordinary. Ultimately, abstraction in Mexican photography emerges not as an escape from reality, but as a deeper engagement with it.

“Abstraction in 20th-century Mexican photography emerges from this exhibition as paradoxically about a deepening engagement with a sense of place, with subject matter toggling between partial visibility and invisibility,” states Benjamin Genocchio who curated the exhibition.

Spencer Throckmorton founded Throckmorton Fine Art in 1980 and maintains a high-profile gallery in New York City’s East 57th Street art district. Throckmorton is unique in its approach to dealing in several categories and for supporting a vigorous exhibition and publishing program for each specialty. He has become one of the foremost sources for important Latin American contemporary and vintage photography, as well as for pre-Columbian artworks, and Chinese jade and antiquities.

Throckmorton Fine Art has participated in the most important art fairs including the annual Winter Show, where it has been a featured exhibitor for the last 30 years, and an exhibitor at The Photography Show presented by AIPAD for more than 20 years. Throckmorton has also been a member of ATADA (The Antique Tribal Art Dealers Association, Inc.) and the International Association for Ancient Asian and Tribal Art (formerly NADAOPA).

For further information contact: Spencer Throckmorton, Throckmorton Fine Art, Inc.
Call: +1 (212) 223-1059 | Email: info@throckmorton-nyc.com

THROCKMORTON FINE ART, 145 E. 57th Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10022