At first glance, Pinta Lima is an easily digestible art gallery: you won’t need to devote more than an hour or two to browsing the 50-something booths and special presentations, if you’re just passing the time. It’s visually pleasing and offers something for most of the 16,000 attendees. But for those who want to discover, learn and connect, this exhibition rewards the slower ones and fosters conversation. Normally, we would describe a gallery of this size as a “convenience store,” but in the case of Pinta Lima, this seems unfair. Intimate is the better option, but it still misses the mark. The art presented is more than the sum of its parts; It’s telling a larger story, connecting shared and disparate histories through objects – perhaps “immersive” is a better description.
Pinta Lima serves as a central node within the broader Pinta network, which organizes exhibitions and art weeks throughout Latin America and the United States. The strategy is deliberate: to build a transnational platform that extends far beyond any single city, designed to highlight, promote and connect Latin American art to and from the entire region.
While Zonamaco has spent two decades promoting Mexico City as a regional hub, Pinta, by contrast, is building a similar ecosystem on a continental scale – connecting multiple markets rather than anchoring itself in just one. Here, contemporary Peruvian art asserts its presence within the global circuit through the dynamic convergence of local and international dialogue.
Pinta Lima certainly relies on curation, from exhibition selection to actual presentations, to extra programs and panel discussions—perhaps more than any of his peers. The Special Projects sections, NEXT and RADAR sections, and especially the FORO panel discussions, give space to and highlight curators and practices that work in a non-local way, building bridges across multiple cities, regions, and artistic languages. The model recalls ARCOMadrid, which helped institutionalize curatorial-led sections within the gallery format several decades ago.
Leading the shift is Erin Gelfman, Pinta’s global coordinator and artistic director, who helped the multi-year regulatory reform process focus the Lima and Miami editions. This tight curatorial focus permeates the exhibition, and the resulting materiality is immediately apparent, with textile/fibre and ceramics being heavily featured in most stalls. These often have the deepest roots, recontextualizing indigenous craft processes and traditions into contemporary practice.
The exhibition is organized into three parts: the main section includes the existing exhibitions forming the central core, with NEXT and RADAR nearby. Curated by Juan Canela, NEXT attempts to redefine the term “emerging” for both galleries and artists, starting from the premise that “the future of Latin American art is not built solely on established names or familiar frameworks, but on processes grounded in experimentation and imagination.” In practice, this often meant physical galleries, where artists produced their work via residencies rather than a fixed studio, experimenting with materials and more. Organized over six months by Guatemala-based Ilaria Conte, RADAR showcased works that brought together rural, marginal and indigenous communities, cultural practices and “material intelligence.” The result is ceramic sculptures that read as textiles, textiles that read as paintings, and photographic works for performances that reinvigorate traditional labor and craft—all of which pass on knowledge and wisdom to generations.
There’s very little glitz, glam or pop art here. The vibe is more untitled and less contextual in Miami. Explicit political or social justice content, outside of the Special Projects Room (a group exhibition entitled “The Image of Another World Formed in Vital Form,” which focused heavily on feminist, corporeal and regional themes), was largely absent. The key word is openly. Once you strike up conversations with a gallery owner or artist (several of whom were in attendance), you’ll find many works that deal with decolonial, feminist, and environmental themes.
Digital businesses were noticeably sparser. While Special Projects had a Gelfman-curated room containing six videos, the rest of the exhibition presented only a handful of digital-first artworks. However, as an example of traditional methods of making and communicating meeting contemporary practices, consider the work of Francisca Rojas, who exhibits with Herlitzka and her partners. Through her Quipus series, Rojas explores the region and its cultural objects, seeks to blur the boundaries between fine arts and crafts, and champions non-Western aesthetics in contemporary art. Quipus are ancient Andean information storage devices, using threads and a basic 10 contract system to record inventory, taxes/tribute, population… anything the rulers wanted to keep track of. (Unfortunately, the Spanish burned most of them, and only a few remain in museums.) Here, Rojas creates configurations reminiscent of chips or integrated circuits, and turns them into real “memory cards” that explore the poetics of time, technology, crafts and cultural heritage. It converts the alphabet into binary, which is then translated into base-10 node; Deciphering each painting reveals a Latin American proverb.
Like Rojas, many distinguished artists have achieved achievements in their countries, but are often unknown outside it. They don’t pop up so much as they go under the radar. Most of them will almost certainly be new to US-based collectors, as their current prices make it prohibitive to display them in US galleries.
In terms of price points, the sweet spot for the Gallery seems to be in the $1,000 to around $10,000 range. According to many galleries, this is due less to Lima’s ability to support high prices than to the relative obscurity of artists outside their countries – a gap that Pinta is working hard to fill. Most of the galleries we surveyed have been participating for several years and reported brisk sales since opening, generally lasting through the weekend.
Galería Martin Yépez oversold its booth, which featured a subset of works from its gallery of Lima-based artists, including paintings by Legal Dungo ($5,500) and Paulo Viejo ($9,000), and multimedia serial photographic works by Claudia Arévalo and Giselle Fernandini, priced at $1,400 and $3,900 per print, respectively.
Carlos Caamaño told the Observer that the gallery has become “more mature” and more global/international, both in terms of galleries and collectors. His eponymous gallery featured works by Peruvian photographer Hans Stoll and, bucking the trend, graphic prints by London-based Kate Hepburn (no, not that one). Works sold ranged from $600 to $6,000.
Mariela Mayorga, director of Tramo Galeria in Buenos Aires, who is participating for the fifth time in Pinta Lima, pointed to a good collector program, repeat customers and new attendees, while describing Lima as a relatively small, but dynamic and expanding market characterized by actively participating collectors. The exhibition proposal focused on works with nature as their main theme, with multiple sales by the three artists: Yiyu Finke ($5,000-$7,000), Lobo Villar ($5,000), and Santiago Quesnel ($6,000). For most U.S. buyers, these price points provide a great opportunity for “early” learning, discovery, and collecting. This is a big difference from the Miami version of the fair, where the works were priced in the millions (Fernando Botero, Wilfredo Lam).
While the gallery generally skews toward lower prices, it features historical works in the five- and six-figure range. Pabellón 4 Arte Contemporáneo reported placing Luis Tomasello in the $60,000-$70,000 range, while Hector La Rosa Galeria (whose show included works worth up to $150,000) set a work by Jorge Elson (Quepos-A-45) in the amount of $72,000. Sales continued in the VIP Lounge and Special Projects, where the Museo de Arte Lima (MALI), in partnership with the Pinta Foundation, acquired multiple works by Mariela Segundo, Virovcha, and Godencia Yubari Quispe, for its permanent collection. However, there was little other reported institutional activity, which one exhibition stated was typical in alternating years, given the near-contemporary Venice Biennale.
More at art fairs, biennials and triennials
