MARCO presents the exhibition Echoes of the Eternal: A Journey from Modernity to the Contemporary, featuring works from a private collection characterized by its owners’ research and monitoring of the development of modernity in Mexico, with important figures from the national avant-garde such as Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Juan O’Gorman, as well as pioneers in modern art such as the renowned Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and the French artist Marcel Duchamp.

From this perspective, the inclusion in the exhibition of one of the two scale sketches that O’Gorman made prior to the mural Retablo de la Revolución (Effective Suffrage, No Reelection) for the National History Museum at Chapultepec Castle is significant. Likewise, the arrival at MARCO of important works in different formats, such as oil on canvas, looms, and two mosaic paintings, is also significant. One is Escenas de circo (Circus Scenes, undated), created by Picasso, and the second is by the Russian-French artist Marc Chagall: Nude on a Blue Cover (1950-1952). Another noteworthy work is Nu aux bas noirs (1910), one of Duchamp’s early nudes. Very few of Duchamp’s paintings are currently preserved internationally, with almost all of them located in the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the United States and the Georges Pompidou National Center for Art and Culture in France.

Curated by Taiyana Pimentel, director of MARCO, with the assistance of Nínive Vargas, associate curator and curator of temporary exhibitions at the museum, the exhibition brings together 140 works by great artists who have left their mark on art from the 20th century to the present day.

The selection of works, which come from a private collection whose owners wish to remain anonymous, presents a part of art history that includes not only the impact of the most avant-garde movements, such as Cubism and Conceptualism, but also the construction of national identity, false ideals of progress, artistic creation in the midst of a diaspora, among other social aspects of the context of the pieces.

The exhibition therefore aims to familiarize the public with the roots of contemporary art and enable them to establish connections in order to understand the evolution of different approaches over time up to the present day.