Fantastic Fables from the Museum of Modern Art's collection are at MUSA

This exhibition is presented under the curatorship of Carlos Segoviano and the MAM Team.
Works by more than 40 artists are part of the Fantastic Fables exhibition from the Museum of Modern Art's collection. These include Jalisco artists Lola Álvarez Bravo, Sofía Echeverri, Jesús Guerrero Galván, Javier Kutz, Carlos Orozco Romero, and Juan Soriano.

The exhibition will be on view from August 29th to January 2026 at MUSA, the Museum of the Arts of the University of Guadalajara, curated by Carlos Segovia.

Raúl Anguiano is included in the exhibition, with pieces recently added to the Museum of Modern Art's collection.
“Not only in Mexican art but in the entire worldview of different territories, there is a kind of cult of mystery, which in modern art we tend to associate strictly with surrealism, but it goes beyond that,” said the curator, referring to a reflection by Teresa del Conde, researcher and former director of the MAM.

The Ministry of Culture of the Government of Mexico, through the National Institute of Fine Arts and Literature and the MAM, in collaboration with MUSA, present this exhibition curated by Carlos Segoviano and the MAM Team, in which unusual visions of the everyday coexist with beings from other worlds, as well as alternate realities.

“We wanted to divide this idea of the magical, the fantastic, into three modules, one that has to do with the unusual everyday, where in everyday places, something has changed, something has moved. It doesn't necessarily have to be supernatural, but it is extraordinary.”
It is in this first nucleus where images of the Day of the Dead can be seen, for example, as in a painting by Cordelia Urueta where death accompanies a girl toward the end of her days.

Another section alludes to the magic of spells, where rituals, priests, and metaphysical thought coexist with shamans, witches, sorceresses, and astronomers, who achieve a vision beyond common reality.

Another one houses beings and figures that transcend reality, perceived as present and accompanying experiences on different levels and as part of an existence that seems a path toward something different. Examples include Francisco Toledo's characters, between the zoomorphic and the human, as well as the images of José Luis Cuevas, among others.

"These are three paths in which we could be talking about magical realism, a realism of the marvelous and the fantastic," Segoviano said.

“I think the richness of the exhibition is that Mexican art is not only understood through political themes or folkloric customs, which, while they make us very proud and were an important period of creation in Mexico, there are other ways of understanding Mexican art that are more closely linked to questions of rituals, the paranormal, and fantastic experiences.”
Carlos Segoviano / Curator

His line of research focuses on the relationships between the European avant-garde and modern Latin American art, with a special emphasis on the collections of Mexican art museums and their international travels, as well as gender-based analysis and the rescue of projects and creators forgotten in historiographical accounts.

He has worked as a journalist, lecturer, author of essays for art catalogs and books, as well as a museum guide and university professor. He holds a PhD in Art History from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), with a specialization in curatorship from the National University Tres de Febrero in Argentina.

He currently works as an associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM), where he has served as researcher, manager, and curator of the exhibitions The Two Fridas: A Tale of Two Cities (2019); Manuel Rodríguez Lozano: The Altarpieces of Death (2020); Manifestos of Mexican Art 1921-1958 (2020 and 2022); and Graciela Iturbide: Portraits for a Ritual (2023), in addition to various co-curatorships.
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