Pinta Lima Offered Curated Content–and Context–for the Curious

At first glance, Pinta Lima is an art fair that’s easily absorbed: you needn’t earmark more than an hour or two to browse the 50-something booths and special presentations, if you’re merely passing time. It’s visually pleasing and offers something for most of its 16,000 attendees. But for those wanting to discover, learn and connect, this fair rewards slower looking and promotes conversation. Normally, we’d characterize a fair of this scale as “boutique,” but in the case of Pinta Lima, that seems an injustice. Intimate is a better choice, but still misses the mark. The art presented is more than the sum of its parts; it’s the telling of a larger story, the connecting of both shared and disparate histories through objects—perhaps “immersion” is the better descriptor.

Pinta Lima functions as a central node within the broader Pinta network, which stages fairs and Art Weeks across Latin America and the U.S. The strategy is deliberate: to build a transnational platform that extends beyond any single city, designed to surface, promote and connect Latin American art from and to the entire region.

While ZONAMACO has spent two decades consolidating Mexico City as a regional hub, Pinta, by contrast, is building a similar ecosystem on a continental scale—connecting multiple markets rather than anchoring in just one. Here, Peruvian contemporary art asserts its presence within the global circuit through a dynamic convergence of local and international dialogue.

Pinta Lima is decidedly curation-driven, from gallery selection through actual presentations, to the collateral programming and panel discussions—perhaps more so than any of its peers. The fair’s Special Projects, NEXT and RADAR sections, and particularly its FORO panel discussions, give space to and highlight curators and practices that operate in a delocalized manner, building bridges across multiple cities, regions and art vernaculars. The model recalls ARCOMadrid, which helped institutionalize curator-led sections within the fair format several decades ago.

Leading this transformation is Irene Gelfman, global curator Pinta and artistic director, whose multi-year curatorial overhaul has helped focus both the Lima and Miami editions. This tight curatorial focus permeates the fair, and the resulting materiality is immediately evident, with textile/fiber and ceramics a significant presence in most booths. It’s these objects that often have the deepest roots, recontextualizing indigenous craft processes and traditions in a contemporary practice.

The fair is organized into three parts: the Main Section includes established galleries forming the central core, with NEXT and RADAR in near proximity. NEXT, curated by Juan Canela, attempts to redefine the term “emerging,” for both galleries and artists, stemming from the premise that “the future of Latin American art is not built solely on established names or familiar frameworks, but on processes grounded in experimentation and imagination.” In practice, this often meant galleries without a physical presence, artists producing work via residencies rather than a fixed studio, material experimentation and more. RADAR, curated over a six-month span by Guatemala-based Ilaria Conti, presented works which brought together rural, marginal and indigenous communities, cultural practices and “material intelligence.” The result is sculptural ceramics which read as textiles, textiles which read as paintings, photographic works of performances reinvigorating traditional labor and craft—all of which communicate generational knowledge and wisdom.

There’s very little glitz, gloss or pop art here. The vibe is more Untitled, less Context Miami. Overtly political or social-justice content, outside of the Special Projects room (a group exhibition entitled “The Image of Another World Takes Shape In a Vibrant Form,” which was keenly focused on feminist, bodily and territorial themes), was largely absent. The key word is overtly; once you have conversations with a gallerist or artist (several were present), you’ll find many works engaging with decolonial, feminist and ecological themes.

Digital works were notably sparse. While Special Projects did have a room curated by Gelfman which contained a half-dozen video pieces, the rest of the fair offered only a few obviously digital-first artworks. However, as an example of traditional methods of making and communication meeting contemporary practice, consider the work of Francisca Rojas, exhibiting with Herlitzka & Co. With her Quipus series, Rojas “explores territory and its cultural objects, seeking to blur the boundaries between the fine arts and crafts, and vindicating non-Western aesthetics within contemporary art.” Quipus are ancient Andean information storage devices, using thread and a base-10 system of knots to record inventories, taxes/tributes, population…anything the rulers wanted to keep track of. (Sadly, the Spanish burned most, and only a few survive in museums.) Here, Rojas creates configurations suggestive of chips or integrated circuits, turning them into genuine “memory cards” that explore the poetics of time, technology, craft and cultural heritage. She converts the alphabet to binary, which is then translated to base-10 knots; decoding each panel reveals a Latin American proverb.

Like Rojas, many of the artists featured are accomplished in their own country, but are often little-known outside it. They’re not so much emerging as under the radar. Certainly, most will be new to U.S.-based collectors, as their current price points make exhibition in U.S. fairs prohibitive.

As to price points, the fair’s sweet spot seems to be from $1,000 to just around $10,000. According to several galleries, this is less driven by Lima’s ability to support higher prices as by the artists’ relative obscurity outside their respective countries—a gap Pinta is working hard to close. Most of the galleries we surveyed were multi-year participants and reported brisk sales right from open, generally continuing through the weekend.

Galería Martin Yépez more than sold out its stand, which featured a subset of works from its gallery exhibition of Lima-based artists, including paintings by Yigal Dongo ($5,500) and Paolo Vigo ($9,000), and serial photographic mixed-media works by Claudia Arévalo and Gysel Fernandini, at $1,400 and $3,900 per edition, respectively.

Carlos Caamaño told Observer that the fair has become “more mature” and more global/international, both in terms of galleries and collectors. His eponymous gallery offered works by Peruvian photographer Hans Stoll and, counter to the prevailing trend, the graphic prints of London-based Kate Hepburn (no, not that one). Sold works ranged from $600 to $6,000.

Mariela Mayorga, Director of Tramo Galería of Buenos Aires, exhibiting for the 5th time at Pinta Lima, cited a good collectors program, repeat clients and new attendees, while describing Lima as a relatively small market, but one which is dynamic, expanding and features actively involved collectors. The gallery’s proposal centered on works with nature as a throughline, with multiple sales for all three artists: Yiyú Finke ($5,000-7,000), Lobo Velar ($5,000) and Santiago Quesnel ($6,000). For most U.S. buyers, these price points offer an incredible opportunity to learn, discover and to collect “early;” this is a significant difference from the Miami edition of the fair, where works were priced into the millions (Fernando Botero, Wilfredo Lam).

While overall the fair skews to the lower end pricing, it did feature historical works in the five and six-figure range. Pabellón 4 Arte Contemporáneo reported the placement of a Luis Tomasello in the range of $60,000-70,000, while Hector La Rosa Galeria (whose display included works as high as $150,000), placed a Jorge Eielson artwork (Quipus-A-45) for $72,000. Sales continued in the VIP lounge and Special Projects, from which Museo de Arte Lima (MALI), in partnership with the Pinta Foundation, acquired multiple works by Mariela Segundo, Verovcha and Gaudencia Yupari Quispe, for its permanent collection. That said, there was little other institutional activity reported, which one gallery stated was typical in alternating years, due to the Venice Biennale’s near-contemporaneous vernissage.

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