Felipe Ehrenberg Returns to London
Curated by Fortunata Calabro
Opening: 8 October 2026. 6-9 pm
9 October – 14 November
Please Read Carefully brings Felipe Ehrenberg (Ciudad de México, 1943–Morelos, 2017) back to London through a selection of works that reveals a less familiar and more intimate side of the Mexican artist.
The exhibition begins with a simple question: what does it mean to read an exhibition?
To read, in this context, means to look beyond the individual work and pay attention to what happens between things: to associations, repetitions, interruptions, memories and unexpected correspondences. Ehrenberg’s practice was built through precisely these kinds of connections. For him, an artwork was rarely a closed or definitive object. Images and ideas could migrate, reappear and acquire different meanings according to where, when and with whom they were encountered.
A significant group of works presented in Please Read Carefully comes from Ehrenberg’s personal collection and has never previously been exhibited. Seen publicly for the first time, these works open onto a more private geography of his life and practice. Their significance may lie in an attachment to a person, a place or a particular moment; in a private joke, an experiment, a memory, or simply in an image the artist was unwilling to let go.
Seen together, they bring us closer to a more intimate dimension of Ehrenberg’s practice, where the boundary between the private individual and the public artist remains deliberately unstable: life enters the work, just as the work continually returns to life.
The exhibition is organised through four constellations rather than chronology: Mapping the World Otherwise, Signs that Refuse to Behave, Ways of Seeing and An Open Ending. Rather than defining fixed themes, they propose different ways of reading Ehrenberg’s work, allowing images, gestures and moments from different periods to encounter one another across time.
Extending this approach beyond the works on the walls, a Reading Table brings together a selection of personal materials, images and documents that visitors are invited to explore. Conceived as a curatorial device and a space for encounter rather than reconstruction, it invites visitors on a journey into Ehrenberg’s world, allowing the person and the artist to merge into a more complex portrait.
The exhibition takes on a particular resonance in London. Ehrenberg arrived in Britain in 1968 and spent several formative years here, a period that profoundly shaped his thinking about artistic production, communication and circulation. His return to London through this exhibition is therefore more than geographical: it reconnects the artist with a place that became fundamental to his practice. In doing so, the exhibition raises a broader question about how we come to know an artist:
What can the works an artist kept for himself reveal that the works he exhibited cannot?
Perhaps these images do not provide an answer. Perhaps their significance lies precisely in resisting one.
They allow us instead to encounter Ehrenberg at a different distance: not only through the history that has been written around his work, but through fragments marked by affection, humour, experimentation, memory and everyday life.
Please Read Carefully asks us to stay with these traces.
To look slowly.
To notice what connects them.
And to accept that there is no single way of seeing Felipe Ehrenberg.
Only different ways of reading him.
Felipe Ehrenberg (1943–2017), born in Mexico City, 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.YLa 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
Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England
