PARIS.- Galerie Peter Kilchmann is presenting the sixth solo exhibition devoted to Melanie Smith (b. 1965 in Poole, UK; lives and works in Mexico). An Age of Liberty When the World Had Been Possible marks two decades of collaboration with the artist and is being shown for the very first time at the gallery’s Paris location.
A multidisciplinary artist whose exhibitions consistently explore drawing, painting, performative film, and installation, Smith enjoys drawing from the vast fields of painting and art history, intertwining them with moving images. In her most recent works, the artist examines the impact of extractivism on specific ecosystems and environments in Latin America. Her research, almost anthropological in nature, leads her to observe territories under multiple threats: whether it is the disappearance of certain species or the uses and traditions that developed in their presence.
Smith simultaneously reveals and affirms how a territory is a space of fragile balance and how the conditions of existence of all the species that inhabit it— human, animal, or plant— can either guarantee or prevent flourishing and enrichment.
"There was a time when I thought a lot about axolotls. I would go to see them at the Jardin des Plantes aquarium and spend hours watching them, observing their immobility, their dark movements. Now, I am an axolotl." Thus begins the story by Julio Cortázar, who imagines, not without terror at the stillness of these amphibians, the metamorphosis or transmutation of his narrator, or perhaps of the reader himself, into one of them. For her Estudios de ajolote 2014-2025 (Axolotl Studies, 2014-2025), British-mexican artist Melanie Smith devoted herself to editing and mixing, cutting and pasting, writing and rewriting Cortázar's story, as well as painting, drawing, and recording axolotls, layering them one on top of the other, making the distinctions and separations between us and them increasingly ambiguous. For this project in Paris, Smith rephrases Cortázar to throw us a riddle or perhaps an omen: An Age of Liberty When the World Had Been Possible."1
The exhibition brings together ten new, intimate-format paintings entitled Axolotl, created especially for the show, as well as numerous works on paper presented in two distinct groups: the Meditation Drawings (2024, watercolour on paper), previously shown at Museo de Arte de Zapopan (Mexico), and the Animation Drawings (2025, multiple formats, watercolour on paper). These works unfold like a constellation of clues guiding the viewer to the room where Smith’s latest film, Axolotl, is projected.
The fantastic short story Axolotl (1956) by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) is thus the starting point for Smith’s project around this curious salamander, which she, like Cortázar, observes from the Jardin des Plantes’ Menagerie. The axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum) is a species native to the Valley of Mexico and is on the brink of extinction: fewer than a thousand individuals are believed to survive in the wild, while millions live in captivity. Once considered a deity, amulet, and enigma, the axolotl is now one of the most studied
animals for its extraordinary regenerative and metamorphic capacities. Since 2014, “Smith is intrigued by axolotls as a surface. As a field of negotiation between membranes, between the internal and the external, between different scales; as a projection screen and its inevitable concealment of any identity.”2 The artist subtracts scientific and tourist imagery from her subject to offer a poetic, even political iconography. Now freely floating in an otherwise natural space, the viewer can no longer anchor these images in a specific temporality. Are they being examined? Imagined? Always figurative, even when seemingly abstract, Smith’s paintings embrace the infinite mysteries and revelations that could be hidden in such a small creature. Yet, it also knows how to dominate us, especially when it engages in hypnotic choreographies that captivate the viewer’s gaze.
As in Cortázar’s story, Smith’s works invite her audience to immerse themselves in the contemplation of the animal to the point where they could radically substitute themselves. And isn’t this precisely the sine qua non condition for respect and preservation? Qualities that cannot be expressed in a passive gaze but require a kind of dedicated embodiment. For the infinitesimal, the most curious species can indeed contain a world of possibilities.
Melanie Smith’s works are included in the collections of renowned international institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Tate Modern, London; British Council Collection, London; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami; MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico and Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zurich. Solo exhibitions have been held at (selection): MAZ Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Mexico (2025); MASP Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil (2022); MARCO Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico (2020); Parc Saint Léger, Pougues- les-Eaux, France (2019); MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain (2018) and CAC Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania (2014). In 2011, she represented Mexico at the 54th Venice Biennale, where the video installations Xilitla, Aztec Stadium and Bulto (Package) were shown. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions at various institutions and biennials, including the British Textile Biennial, London (2025); Museo Tamayo, Mexico (2024); Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz (2023); PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2022); Pavement Gallery, Manchester (2021); Kunstmuseum Bern (2020 and 2016); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019); Liverpool Biennial (2018); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016) and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2016). In September 2026, she will present a solo exhibition at IVAM – Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Spain, curated by Helena Chávez Mac Gregor.
1 Helena Chávez Mac Gregor
