Pedro Reyes Opens the Doors of His Monumental Studio in Mexico City – Galerie Magazine

24 March 2026

After achieving international recognition as a socially and politically engaged conceptual artist, Pedro Reyes embraced the ancient practice of stone carving. This mid-career shift coincided with his move with his wife and children in 2014 to the Coyoacán neighborhood of Mexico City. Not far from where Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera once lived and worked, the area was also home to a quarry for centuries.

“A lot of the stones used for the pyramids and the colonial buildings after that were sourced from this place,” says Reyes, who designed and built a studio from prefab concrete next to his home, creating a double-height stone workshop as well as spaces for drawing, painting, and wood- and metalworking. “I felt this desire to respond to the material qualities of the geography and the legacy of stone carving. Part of what I’m doing is keeping that trade alive.”

Born and raised in Mexico City, Reyes trained as an architect at the Ibero-American University in the capital. Early in his career, he began developing what he calls “social sculptures,” which provide tools and systems for public participation and propose hopeful solutions for societal problems.

In 2008, for instance, he began inviting Mexican citizens to trade in guns for coupons to buy appliances and electronics. He melted down 1,527 firearms and repurposed the metal to make 1,527 shovels, which were then used to plant trees—“turning an agent of death into an agent of life,” in Reyes’s words. Titled Palas por Pistolas (“Shovels for Guns”), the project traveled to a number of schools and art institutions worldwide.

Another example of his lively public engagement is Sanatorium, an interactive temporary clinic first conceived in 2011 for the Guggenheim Museum in New York and restaged at multiple venues. Reyes trained volunteer therapists to lead visitors through exercises blending art and psychology to address issues such as anger, stress, and loneliness.

Reyes began his serious dive into stone carving a decade ago, influenced by his neighbor Geles Cabrera, a sculptor who is now almost 100. Working primarily with local volcanic stone that he personally selects, Reyes makes sculptures that weave together motifs found in ancient Mesoamerican carvings in a modernist abstract style influenced by sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi and Isamu Noguchi. The titles are typically expressed in Nahuatl. “The way you write the Nahuatl language is through pictograms, and these pictograms give me not only a conceptual vocabulary but also a formal one,” says Reyes, whose three-dimensional compositions can be read as a form of concrete poetry.

Initially, his stone sculptures took some curators and critics by surprise. But Reyes, who showed several new examples at Lisson Gallery in New York this past fall, sees the medium as an expansion rather than a departure, with both aspects of his practice having a social dimension.

“Sculpture involves teamwork, and the studio has become almost like a guild,” says Reyes, noting that most stone carving today is done by robotic machines. “For every robot you introduce into a manufacturing process, six people lose their jobs. We have gravitated in the studio toward using as little technology as possible. It’s resisting homogeneity.”

Read the full article by Hilarie Sheets for Galerie Magazine here.

Image: Portrait of Pedro Reyes by Marina Denisova