The Haines Gallery presents Pilgrimages, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of new and recent works by Mexican artist Ricardo Mazal (b. 1950). Mazal uses abstraction to communicate symbolic themes of transformation, impermanence, renewal, and return. Based in Mexico City, Santa Fe, and New York City, Pilgrimages combines paintings from five interrelated bodies of work executed over the last five years.
Spiritual investigations
Mazal uses abstraction as a key to investigate spiritual sites and cultural traditions. In an unusual approach to subject material, his process often begins with careful photographic documentation, which he then translates into abstractions that evoke inner worlds, and unseen aspects under the surfaces of the places he visits. From the old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, one of the oldest Jewish burial grounds in the world; to the Zapotec communities in Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, Southern Mexico; to Tibet and Bhutan in the Himalayas, Mazal treats the representational through a prism of dreamlike imagination.
‘White Mountain’
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. Some believe it is the home of gods and a location for divine revelations. This pilgrimage trek known as the kora is believed to have other benefits including washing away sins. 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 these new White Mountain paintings.
In both White Mountain PF 2, (2025) and White Mountain 10, (2024), the vibrant brushstrokes resemble lines corrugated in the snow left behind by high altitude winds. White Mountain 10’s dark cross-hatchings contrasted in white could be the rock ornamented by snow, and the light grey, horizontal cross-hatchings are reminiscent of a powerful snowstorm. The vivid reds and blues billowing across the stark white canvas backgrounds call 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.
‘Ba Zasa’
In 2021, Mazal returned to his birthplace in Mexico City, where he reestablished a studio after living and working abroad for over three decades. Ba Zasa is a series the artist began shortly after this homecoming, comprised of paintings that reflect the lightness and freedom associated with the idea of home. In Ba Zasa Red Lake 5 (2024), flurries of white brushstrokes dance over a dark red background suggesting migratory birds finding their way across the sky and over vast geographic areas to hone in and locate home.
The same motifs repeat in Gashe 5 (Yellow) (2025) and Gaa 5 (Green) (2025). The acrylic is painted on handmade silk on aluminum panels 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 on through generations. In a nod to traditional craftsmanship and community, the Zapotec word for the silk’s color (gashe for “yellow,” yaba for “blue,” and gaa for “green”) carry over into the titles.
The ‘Prague’ paintings
The new work is complemented by earlier works such as Mazal’s Prague paintings. Dark intersecting blocks of geometric elements recall the thousands of overlapping gravestones contained within the city’s Old Jewish Cemetery. Each stone marks a life and death, an indicator of human endeavors like prayer flags circumscribing Mount Kailash. The journeys, like the marks on canvas say “I am here,” and connect those forms, colors and textures to a larger human narrative.
Ricardo Mazal’s Pilgrimages is a meditation on the ways that humans mark time and place, and how we create stories to bring meaning to our collective experiences through our adherence to traditions.
“Pilgrimages” opens March 22 at the Haines Gallery and will be on view through April 26.