The National Gallery will dedicate an exhibition to a Latin American artist for the first time

The British institution will exhibit from March 29 the exhibition ‘José María Velasco: A View of Mexico’ about the famous Mexican landscape artist, in what will be the first exhibition dedicated by the museum to a Latin American artist in its 200-year history.
‘José María Velasco: A View of Mexico’ will also be the first monographic exhibition in British territory dedicated to Velasco, one of the most famous Mexican painters of the 19th century, and coincides with the 200th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and Mexico.

The exhibition, which will remain at the London museum until August 17, 2025, will establish links between Velasco’s work and other paintings at the National Gallery, in particular Édouard Manet’s ‘The Execution of Maximilian’ (1867-68), which depicts the execution of the Austrian ruler in Mexico.
Velasco’s work (1840-1912) is known for brilliantly portraying the landscapes of Mexico and the surroundings of the country’s capital, as well as for the representation of social change and industrialization in his paintings; for this reason this exhibition will also address “broader concerns” about the relationship between humans and the environment.
According to a statement from the National Gallery, although Velasco exhibited his paintings in Europe and the United States during his lifetime, there are no paintings by the Mexican in public collections in the United Kingdom and his last large-scale exhibition outside Mexico was held in 1976 between San Antonio and Austin, Texas (United States).

On this occasion, the exhibition, curated by the artist Dexter Dalwood and the associate curator of Spanish painting at the National Gallery Daniel Sobrino, is jointly organized by the National Gallery in London and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA), in Minnesota (United States) and will travel through both cities until January 2026.

According to Dalwood and Sobrino, this exhibition will “expand and improve” the understanding of 19th century landscape painting through Velasco's works, which absorbed “the tradition and history of European landscape painting, while taking the representation and understanding of the Mexican landscape to a new level of pictorial intelligence.”
Source