Texas Artist Billy Kasberg Brings His World to Mérida in a New Show at Anónima Bistro

Billy Kasberg doesn’t fit neatly into any one category, which is exactly the point. The Austin-based artist — who now splits his time between Texas and Mérida — makes paintings that feel like a cross between a microscope slide and a fever dream: dense, layered acrylic compositions in which human anatomy, microbiology, and the raw forces of nature dissolve into one another. The result is work that’s hard to look away from, and harder still to fully explain.

That tension is intentional. Kasberg came up through the fine arts program at the University of North Texas, later deepening his practice at The Contemporary Austin at Laguna Gloria, one of the city’s most respected institutions for contemporary art. He also holds a master’s degree in information systems from the University of Phoenix — a combination that tells you something about the man. He moves comfortably between the analog and the digital, the handmade and the computational, and his canvases reflect that dual fluency.

His influences read like a passport stamped with extraordinary destinations. The sensory overload of India, the bold visual language of tribal art from Papua New Guinea, the intricate textile traditions of the Kuna people of Panama — Kasberg draws from all of it, weaving pattern and repetition into compositions that carry genuine symbolic weight. These aren’t decorative exercises. Their works ask questions about ritual, identity, and what it means to be a body moving through a world.

Mérida, it turns out, gave him a lot to work with. Kasberg lived here before presenting a successful debut show at Alcala Galerie in Colonia México last August, his first solo exhibition in the Yucatán. The work on view this time was made during that residency in the city — pieces shaped, at least in part, by the light, the heat, and the visual density that anyone who’s spent real time here knows well.

The new exhibition opened Saturday at Anónima Bistro, the elegant spot known for its natural and Mexican wine selection, serious cocktail program, and a dining room that somehow manages to feel both refined and relaxed.

A Growing Gallery Presence

The show marks the second collaboration between Alcala Galerie and Anónima Bistro. Their first paired exhibition featured works by Mexican artist Eric Muñoz, following his show at Casa Monasterio in 2024. Since 2023, Alcalá Galerie has been quietly building a reputation in Mérida for presenting ambitious, international artistic proposals — the kind that push past the expected.

The gallery also maintains an ongoing partnership with Cinco+Uno Galería, a Yucatecan institution that is celebrating its 16th anniversary with an upcoming show in March. That pairing speaks well of both: a newer curatorial voice in dialogue with one that has been shaping the local scene for a decade and a half.

The Kasberg exhibition will remain on view for several months.

Anonima Bistro: 66 Avenida Jose Diaz Bolio, Col. México