Art of NOMA has no gallery space. No address in Polanco, no white cube, no invigilator on a stool in the corner. This is a deliberate choice rather than a stage we are waiting to grow out of, and it changes the experience of collecting in ways worth being explicit about — including the ways it costs something.
Every Price Is Published
Start with the part collectors mention most. In a physical gallery, prices are frequently not on the wall. To find out what a painting costs you have to ask a person, in a quiet room, in front of other people — and the asking is itself a small test of whether you belong there. Plenty of people who would happily have bought the work simply leave instead.
Every work at Art of NOMA carries its price on the page. Open Your Eyes by Jorge Tellaeche is USD 3,685. A small Sinergy canvas by Karlos Ibarra is USD 550. You can establish in four seconds whether an artist is within reach, without asking anyone's permission and without performing knowledge you don't yet have. For a first-time collector this is the single largest barrier removed.
Price opacity is usually defended as discretion, or as flexibility to price by relationship. Both are real. But the cost falls almost entirely on the newest buyers, who have not yet learned that asking is normal and who read the silence as a signal that the work is not for them. Published prices make the first step survivable — and that is the step where most potential collectors are lost.
A Roster No Room Could Hold
A physical gallery of our size shows perhaps fifteen to thirty works at a time and mounts a handful of exhibitions a year. Everything else lives in storage. That constraint isn't a failure of ambition — it's what a lease and four walls impose.
We carry more than 250 works by over 50 artists, all visible at once, permanently. An artist doesn't wait eight months for a slot in a hanging schedule; their work goes up and stays up. A collector who becomes interested in Nuria Oliva at eleven at night can see twelve of her paintings immediately rather than the two that happen to be hanging. Depth of roster is the thing an online gallery can do that a room cannot, and it is why our programme skews toward emerging artists — the ones a space-constrained gallery can least afford to take a risk on.
That depth also lets very different practices sit side by side without competing for the same wall. Taeko Nomiya's limited-edition photographs — Karaoke, Tokiota, Kyokai Iglesia, all at USD 1,500 — are quiet, observational images that would be swallowed whole in a group hang next to something loud. Gareth Stehr's unique paintings, like At The Altar Of The Sun at USD 3,575, work in the opposite register: graphic, high-contrast, aerosol-inflected. Genoveva Kelleher's SOUL mixed-media works, USD 2,500 to USD 3,500, are built in layers that reveal themselves slowly.
In a room, someone has to decide which of those three gets the good wall this quarter. Online, all three stay available at their own price points, and a collector can move between a USD 300 signed print and a USD 4,125 unique painting in a single visit — closer to how collections actually get built.
Nobody Is Hovering While You Decide
Collecting art is supposed to involve deliberation, and galleries are not always designed to permit it. You look, someone approaches, and a decision that deserves weeks compresses into a conversation you didn't plan to have.
Online you can return to the same painting nine times over a month, at midnight, from your sofa, and decide nothing at all. This matters more than it sounds. The works people keep for decades are almost never the ones bought in a single charged encounter; they are the ones that survived repeated, unpressured looking. A sales floor is optimised to close the first visit. A website is indifferent to how long you take, and that indifference is on the collector's side.
When you're ready to ask something — about scale, condition, framing, whether it will survive a humid climate, whether a payment plan is possible — you ask, and the answer comes from the people who actually placed the work. That is a different relationship to time, and it suits how most people genuinely arrive at a purchase of this size.
The Overhead Goes Somewhere Better
A ground-floor space in a desirable neighbourhood is one of the largest costs a gallery carries, and that cost is paid for out of the same margin that would otherwise reach the artist. Without it, the economics of representing emerging artists change: we can take on a painter with no auction record and no collector base, and keep their prices at a level where people actually buy, because we are not underwriting a room.
The arithmetic shapes programming everywhere. A gallery paying serious rent needs a reliable sell-through rate, which pushes it toward artists who already have one — proven names, repeat bodies of work, formats that move. That is a rational response to fixed costs. Removing the room removes the pressure to be conservative: it is the difference between showing an artist because the work is good and showing them because they can cover a month's lease.
Where the Collectors Actually Are
A gallery in Mexico City serves the people who walk past it. The two most significant collectors to reach us this year were both in Guadalajara — five hours away, and effectively invisible to a physical space in the capital. Others are in the United States, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Being online means Mexico City is where our curation comes from, not the limit of who we can reach. For artists working in Mexico and Latin America, that is the whole proposition: their collector is as likely to be in Los Angeles as in Roma Norte.
What Is Genuinely Lost, and What We Do About It
We would be selling you something if we claimed nothing is given up. Two things are.
Scale doesn't transmit. A 130 × 100 cm canvas and a 30 × 25 cm panel look identical on a phone. We publish dimensions in centimetres and inches on every work, and the most reliable trick costs nothing: cut the dimensions out of newspaper, tape the shape to your wall, and live with the outline for a few days.
Surface doesn't transmit either. Impasto, the sheen of a glaze, the way light moves across worked paint — a photograph flattens all of it. Mixed-media surfaces suffer most; the built-up layers in Kelleher's SOUL works read as flat colour on a screen and as physical relief in the room. We shoot multiple angles, in-situ views and video where we can, and we will send additional detail images or a video walkthrough of any specific work on request. It narrows the gap. It does not close it entirely, and any gallery telling you otherwise is overselling.
This is also why we sell by inquiry rather than expecting anyone to put a four-thousand-dollar painting through a checkout. Ask about a piece and a person answers, with more images, condition notes, shipping costs and payment options. Every work ships fully insured worldwide with a certificate of authenticity.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Art of NOMA a real gallery?
Yes. Art of NOMA is a contemporary art gallery based in Mexico City representing more than 50 emerging international artists, and an official partner of Artsy. It operates entirely online rather than from a physical exhibition space, which is a deliberate model choice rather than a temporary arrangement.
Can I see the artwork in person before buying?
Works are held in Mexico City and viewings can sometimes be arranged by appointment. For collectors elsewhere, we provide additional detail photography and video walkthroughs of any specific piece on request, along with exact dimensions in centimetres and inches. Taping the dimensions to your wall for a few days is the closest low-cost substitute for seeing a work in the room.
Is it safe to buy original art online?
Buy from a gallery that publishes prices, provides a certificate of authenticity, states its shipping and returns terms plainly, and answers questions from a named person. Every Art of NOMA work is authenticated, shipped fully insured worldwide with tracking, and covered by clear return terms.
How much does art at Art of NOMA cost?
Most original works sit between roughly USD 600 and USD 5,000, with signed limited-edition prints from USD 250 and a small number of major works above USD 10,000. Prices are shown on every piece, so you never have to ask before knowing whether an artist is within reach.
Browse the full roster on our artists page, explore original paintings, photography and sculpture, or read why young collectors are choosing original emerging art. If a particular work holds your attention, send us a message about it — every inquiry is answered by a person who has handled the piece.