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Ricardo Mazal:
PilgrimagesMarch 22 - April 26, 2025
Haines proudly presents Pilgrimages, an exhibition of new and recent works by Mexican artist Ricardo Mazal. Based between Mexico City, Santa Fe, and New York City, Mazal is well-known for his expansive painting practice that uses the language of abstraction to explore themes of transformation, impermanence, renewal, and return. Pilgrimages brings together paintings from five interrelated bodies of work created over the last five years, including a selection from his two latest series, Ba Zasa and White Mountain.
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Pilgrimages invites viewers into Mazal’s investigations of spiritual sites and cultural traditions across the globe, from the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, one of the oldest Jewish burial grounds in the world; to Tibet and Bhutan in the Himalayas; to a remote montain village in Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, Southern Mexico, where generations of artisans have cultivated silkworms and produced hand-spun, hand-woven silk textiles. The artist's process often begins with careful photographic documentation, which he ultimately translates into lush, abstract paintings that evoke aspects of the places he has experienced.
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In 2021, Mazal returned to his birthplace of Mexico City, where he reestablished a studio after living and working abroad for over three decades. Ba Zasa, a series he began shortly after this homecoming, comprises paintings filled with lightness and freedom. Flurries of white brushstrokes applied over rich expanses of color suggest migratory birds making their way across the sky — echoing the artist’s own migration home.
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These same motifs recur in Mazal’s latest series of smaller-scale paintings made on handmade silk panels. Mazal created these works in collaboration with artisans from the Zapotec community of San Pedro Cajonos, a remote mountain village in Oaxaca where, for hundreds of years, the Zapotec have reared silkworms for silk production. The panels are woven from hand-spun fibers and dyed with pigments derived from flowers, tree bark, and insects — skills passed down through generations. Celebrating this traditional craftsmanship and community, each work is titled after the Zapotec word for the silk’s color (gashe for “yellow,” yaba for “blue,” gaa for “green”).
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"Working with a craftsman and his family, who have been doing this for the last 400 years… It’s like a jewel. I think that this is one of the most important things that has happened to me in the last few years. Returning to Mexico has meant working with local materials and local people who have been doing this for centuries. That was one of the ways to return to my country, to really put a stamp in the work that I was doing."
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White Mountain is the latest installment of a series that first began over a decade ago, when Mazal first visited Mount Kailash, Tibet’s holiest summit. Completing the Kora, a 33-mile trek around the mountain performed by Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and Bonpo pilgrims, Mazal notes he was “struck by the convergence of the material and invisible worlds.” His observations from this 21-day journey emerge in his new White Mountain paintings. In some works, diagonal compositions evoke the powerful winds that lash through the region, and Mount Kailash’s snow-streaked, distinctively striated face. In others, sinuous bands of color billow across stark white canvases, calling to mind the lines of prayer flags along the Kora path and their associations with hope and possibility. In Tibetan belief, the wind carries prayers not to the gods above, but out into the world around us.
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These new works are complemented by earlier works such as Mazal’s Prague paintings, in which intersecting geometric elements and ridged, rippling paint recall the thousands of overlapping gravestones contained within the city’s Old Jewish Cemetery. Like the countless prayer flags circumscribing Mount Kailash, a mark of previous journeys, and the traditionally woven textiles of the Zapotec, these forms point to layers of history and community. Throughout Pilgrimages, Mazal revisits forms, colors, and textures of his travels, drawing commonalities between diverse places and rituals. His painterly meditations reveal a longstanding concern with how we experience both the material world and the ineffable, and the profound experiences found in the everyday.
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RETURN TO EXHIBITION PAGE
Installation photography: Robert Divers Herrick; supporting images and footage courtesy the artist's studio
