A major retrospective of pioneering sculptor Geles Cabrera has opened at the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, celebrating her centennial year. The exhibition, titled "Partituras Corporales," spans seven decades of her work, featuring nearly 100 sculptures in materials from volcanic stone to plexiglass, and highlights her radical focus on the expressive, often erotic, human body. It follows her recent receipt of Mexico's highest artistic honor, the 2024 Bellas Artes Medal in Visual Arts.
The exhibition provides long-overdue institutional recognition for Cabrera, one of Mexico's first modern female sculptors, who worked outside the dominant Muralist movement. It situates her legacy within a broader art historical context, revealing her synthesis of Western modernism with Mesoamerican and Afro-Caribbean influences. The show also revisits her significant, yet previously overlooked, role as a creator of her own exhibition space, the Museo Escultórico, and marks a culmination of renewed interest in her work driven by recent gallery representation and international exhibitions.