Pedro Reyes at Lisson Gallery, NYC
Sept 11 – October 18, 2025
Pedro Reyes has built a reputation for monumental sculpture, treating stone as both a material and a metaphor. His new exhibition at Lisson Gallery tightens this focus while also widening it, bringing together towering carvings with a debut series of mosaics. The result is an installation that reads less like a group show than a landscape: a sculptural forest where figures, patterns, and symbols seem to grow from the ground up.
The works draw on Mesoamerican cosmology. Reyes channels the languages of Mexica and Olmec carving, reimagining their weight and form through a modernist lens that recalls both Art Deco and the cool logic of geometric abstraction. This cross-pollination allows him to move between epochs, suggesting that heritage is not a static archive but a living vocabulary. The gallery becomes a bridge between ancient memory and contemporary sensibility.
Animal forms appear throughout, sharpened into totemic clarity. Jaguars, monkeys, axolotls, and coyotes emerge, not as illustrations but as distillations of myth and instinct. Coyotl (2025) exemplifies this synthesis. The figure’s tail and neck cut in crisp, geometric planes, its posture at once wary and defiant. The work honors Coyoacán—literally “the place of the coyotes”—the Mexico City neighborhood where Reyes lives and works. “Often described as a creature between a dog and a wolf, the coyote plays the role of a trickster spirit in pre-Columbian mythology,” Reyes explains. “It also serves as a symbol of earthly wisdom because of its astute nature.” The piece feels personal and mythic at once: a neighborhood spirit carved in stone.
If the sculptures claim space, the mosaics refine it. Made from volcanic rock, marble, glass, silver, and gold, they glitter with tactile complexity. Their tessellated surfaces are intimate, rhythmic, and precise—portals within the larger exhibition. Standing before them requires a different kind of attention, one that slows the body and sharpens the eye. In this new medium, Reyes shows that monumentality can be achieved through detail as much as through scale.
The exhibition encourages a choreography of movement. Sculptures and mosaics are positioned less as solitary objects than as neighbors in a shared ecosystem. As visitors shift through the gallery, perspectives realign; silhouettes tighten or dissolve; surface and shadow exchange roles. Reyes underscores sculpture as an embodied practice: it unfolds in time, through steps, pauses, and glances.
Despite the variety of forms, a unity of intention binds the show. Whether monumental or intricate, animal or abstract, each work carries symbolic density while maintaining formal clarity. The new mosaics expand Reyes’ vocabulary without diluting it, adding intimacy to his ongoing dialogue with myth and matter. Together, the works create an environment where the past and present coexist, not as opposites but as continuities.
Reyes has long approached sculpture as a vessel for memory and resilience. Here, he adds texture and rhythm to that vessel, offering viewers not only a forest of stone but also windows of color and light. The show feels less like a departure than a deepening, one in which the artist roots himself even more firmly in tradition while extending its branches into new directions.