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Galerie Peter Kilchmann is delighted to present 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 will be shown for the very first time at the gallery’s Paris location.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Galerie Peter Kilchmann
11-13 rue des Arquebusiers, Paris
, 10 January - 27 February 2026
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