La vida de las cosas. Naturaleza muerta y cultura material

Beside Zurbarán's Supper at Emmaus, painted in 1639, sits a small wooden sphere. Lean in and you smell the painting: specialists from the Museo del Perfume worked out what some of the canvases here would smell like. For once in a museum, putting your nose close to a nearly 400-year-old picture is the point.

The Zurbarán opens about 140 works from some 15 collections, 16th century to 21st, hung out of chronological order. Five sections (origins, fruit and vegetables, flowers, animals, manufactured things) put Arrieta, Orozco, Siqueiros and Olga Costa beside Omar Gámez's 2024 photographs of flower arrangements made as portraits. The last room sets real glass, porcelain and talavera beside the canvases.

The museum's director told La Jornada the genre has long been dismissed as bourgeois, and this show argues otherwise. Entry is MXN 75, free on Sundays and for students, teachers and INAPAM holders. Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 18:00, until 10 January 2027.