Mexico City Museum Reopens With Pablo Rasgado’s Restoration-Driven Installation
At Laboratorio Arte Alameda, the repair work is not hidden behind the exhibition. It is the exhibition. The museum in Mexico City’s historic centre reopened earlier this month with Pentimento, a site-specific project by Mexican artist Pablo Rasgado (b. 1984) that was developed in tandem with the building’s restoration and draws directly from its material remains.
The museum had been closed since December 30, 2025, while crews addressed damage from the 2017 earthquakes and water infiltration. The restoration, overseen by the Centro Histórico Trust alongside Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, consolidated the main nave’s vaults and dome, as well as the Chapel of Sorrows. It also required help from biologists after invasive plant species took root in the structure’s crevices.
Rather than treat the process as a purely technical intervention, Laboratorio Arte Alameda used it to sharpen its curatorial identity. The institution, which opened in 2000, occupies a former 16th-century Franciscan convent whose construction began in 1591. The site carries a difficult and layered history: between 1596 and 1771, the square in front of the convent served as an execution ground during the Mexican Inquisition. The building later housed the Pinacoteca Virreinal, which displayed 350 colonial paintings before the collection was moved to the nearby Museo Nacional de Arte.
That history is embedded in Rasgado’s project. Working in residence throughout the restoration, he incorporated wall paint layers from different periods, restoration debris, and reworked copies of colonial paintings into Pentimento, which remains on view until October 18. More than 13 tons of debris were set aside for Rasgado and his team to sort through, and the artist also created two benches from debris and resin.
The title refers to pentimento, the art-historical term for changes in a painting that later become visible through infrared reflectography, X-rays, or pigment decay. Rasgado extends the idea by producing fictitious pentimenti over digital facsimiles of 27 colonial paintings that once hung at the Pinacoteca Virreinal. In doing so, he turns restoration into a form of speculative archaeology, one that treats the convent’s surfaces, losses, and revisions as part of the work’s meaning.
For Laboratorio Arte Alameda, the reopening signals more than a return to public view. It reframes the museum as a laboratory in the fullest sense: a place where conservation, memory, and artistic experimentation can occupy the same space without being separated into neat categories.
