Felipe Ehrenberg

26 Maculate Letters from Mexico

An Unfinished Conversation

Curator: Fortunata Calabró

This exhibition is a letter that took ten years to arrive.

Like every letter, it carries memories, ideas, delays, absences and encounters. It also carries the possibility of beg inning again.

At its centre are the 26 Maculate Letters from Mexico, conceived by Felipe Ehrenberg for an exhibition in London in 2016. For Ehrenberg, correspondence was never simply a means of communication. It was movement: between people, places, images and ideas; a way of sending something into the world without entirely knowing where it might lead.

The postal system had been part of Ehrenberg’s artistic and personal vocabulary since his first years in Britain. Arriving in England in 1968, he was struck by the efficiency of its postal service and began corresponding intensely between Britain, Mexico and elsewhere. Decades later, the Maculate Letters returned to that history: an experiment with what remained of the postal system, but also, in Felipe’s words, a return to the pleasure of receiving a “real” letter.

Here, the Maculate Letters enter into conversation with a selection of earlier works from 2010. Rather than constructing a chronology, their presence traces continuities across Ehrenberg’s practice: fragments, signs, words and images that circulate, collide, disappear and return in different forms.

Ten years after the exhibition was originally conceived, these works enter a new space and a different moment. The title Felipe himself gave the project — 26 Maculate Letters from Mexico — has been preserved. This is not an attempt to reconstruct the exhibition that might have been, but to allow an exchange interrupted by time to continue.

Perhaps every letter remains unfinished until someone opens it.

Information

Felipe Ehrenberg (Mexico 1943–2017), was a pioneering Mexican artist whose work
defied easy classification. Throughout his career, he explored conceptual art, performance, mail
art, mimeography, artist’s books, installations, painting, collage, and editorial projects. After the
political upheavals of 1968 in Mexico, Ehrenberg went into exile in England, where he co-
founded Beau Geste Press — an important hub for experimental publications and Fluxus-related
collaborations. His work during this period connected artists across continents through printed
visual poetry and conceptual networks.

Upon returning to Mexico, he co-founded the collective Grupo Proceso Pentágono and later H2O
Talleres de Comunicación, creating public murals and fostering cultural projects rooted in
community participation. His artistic and political commitments often merged, producing work that
was both socially engaged and formally experimental. Ehrenberg also served as Mexico’s
cultural attaché in Brazil from 2001 to 2006. Over more than five decades, his practice remained
committed to collaboration, activism, and constant reinvention, securing his legacy as one of
Latin America’s most influential and unconventional contemporary artists.

Selected Exhibitions

2021 – Testamento (1968–2017), retrospective of collages, ISLAA, New York
2017 – Living in My Art-room (solo), Baró Galeria, São Paulo
2015 – Felipe Ehrenberg 67 // 15, first solo exhibition in Spain, Galería Freijo, Madrid
2010 – Manchuria – visión periférica, retrospective at Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; then
MOLAA, Los Angeles; and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo
2003 – Interfaces Contemporâneas – MAC 40 Anos, Museu de Arte Contemporânea da USP
1977 – Poéticas Visuais, MAC USP, São Paulo
1968 – Salón Codex de Pintura Latinoamericana, Buenos Aires (representing Mexico)

Collections

Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City
National Museum of Printing, Mexico City
Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City
Museum of the Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico DF
Museum of Contemporary Art of Morelia, Mich. Mexico
El Chopo University Museum of Sciences and Arts, Mexico DF. Pascual and Art Workers
Cultural Foundation (Mexico) Juan José Díaz Infante and Jennifer Dastur Collection
Jesús Galván Collection
Enrique Jackson Ramírez Collection Carlos Martínez Collection Antonio Mayer Collection
Francisco Rocha Merino Collection Pedro Meyer Collection
Museum of Contemporary Art of Sao Paulo, Brazil (Pinacoteca) Franklin Rawson
Museum of Fine Arts, Argentina.
Museum of Solidarity With Chile Salvador Allende.
Museum of Art of the University of Puerto Rico, Institute of Puerto Rican Culture
Art and Communication Center (CAYC), Buenos Aires
Visual Arts Center / Museo del Barrio de Asunción; Asunción, Paraguay (monographic
monotype) National Museum of Mexican Art Chicago, Museum of Latin American Art,
Long Beach, California
Museum of Contemporary Art 0f Chicago (Chicago, Ill. USA) Museum of Contemporary
Art of Chicago, Artist Books Holding
Museum of Modern Art of New York
The Banff Center for the Arts, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Mexican Museum of San Francisco, California
Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, N.Y

La Raza Art Gallery & Cultural Center, San Francisco, Ca.
Fondo del Sol, Washington D.C.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
International Museum of Electrography of Cuenca, Spain
Tate National Gallery, London,
TOOL Center, Milan
Fiat Collection, Italy