Lilia Carrillo: Ruptures and Premonitions

Americas Society is pleased to present Lilia Carrillo: Ruptures and Premonitions, curated by Tobias Ostrander. This exhibition will introduce the work of Mexican painter Lilia Carrillo through a survey of two dozen of her most accomplished paintings, alongside a selection of archival photographs, letters, invitations, and publications.

Lilia Carrillo (b. 1930, Mexico City) was a central figure within the group of postwar Mexican painters known as the Generación de Rupture or the Rupture Generation, and its most prominent female protagonist. Carillo was part of a close circle of artists including her second husband Manuel Felguérez, Fernando García Ponce, Vlady, Vicente Rojo, and Juan Soriano—who professed their interest in abstraction and entered into an international dialogue with painterly tendencies occurring in New York and Paris, such as Abstract Expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction, and Informalism.

Lilia Carrillo: Ruptures and Premonitions will present a selection of the artist’s paintings from 1960, roughly the year her aesthetic language was consolidated, until 1973, the year before her premature death. The ruptures shaping the presentation include both Carrillo’s association with Generación de la Ruptura and her formal interests in challenging the stability of the picture plane and emphasizing the physicality of the painted surface. The exhibition will survey the artist’s disruptive gestures of building up thick surfaces that she then carved or scratched into, integrating collaged fabrics or paper fragments into her canvases, smudging her compositions, and using brushes of diverse sizes and other tools to apply and disperse her pigments.

To accompany the exhibition, Americas Society will present a series of public programs and illustrated catalogue.

The exhibition will be on view from May 6 to August 1, 2026.