VIK MUNIZ: PHOTOGRAPHY AND STRUCTURE IN ELBA BENÍTEZ

Liliana Porter (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1941) has a long history shared with Espacio Minimo. The Madrid gallery pampers every move and celebrates the extensive relationship with the Argentinean artist, always offering her the possibility of receiving her work and witnessing its evolution. For the opening of the space's season, the landing is called Otros cuentos inconclusos, a new proposal that deals with representation and two dimensional axes —space and time— that bear witness to many of the questions raised about human relations.

Cuban-born artist Ariamna Contino presents the exhibition Manigua at El Apartamento, in Spain to revisit the concept of “manigua”, a term historically used to refer to a tropical forest ecosystem.

The Patio Herreriano Museum hosts the recent proposal by Sandra Gamboa (Bogota, Colombia) in which she outlines the necessary arguments to be able to analyse mental health, especially anxiety and depression. In Encapsulados, the Colombian-Spanish artist invites us to carry out this exercise of understanding, rapprochement and empathy with those who suffer from one of the great plagues of this century through the different related iconography that fills the exhibition hall of the Castilian institution.

La Panera Art Center of Lleida presents in its exhibition Descolonicemos el mundo(Decolonize the World) a conceptual tour through the production of Regina Jose Galindo (Guatemala City, Guatemala, 1974) in which a decolonizing approach prevails. Although in some cases of her work this process is not so evident, this view can be traced from the geographical experience of the artist's country of origin and its process of colonization and independence.

The double problem that arose from the acquisition in the 1980s of several hippopotamuses in one of the many eccentricities of the trafficker Pablo Escóbar is the starting point of a fable that, between the tragic and the comic, Camilo Restrepo (Medellín, Colombia, 1975) has managed to weave with a very successful graphic and conceptual narrative. With Cocaine Hippos Sweat Blood, the spectator faces this surrealistic story from its beginnings to the present by the hand of a figurativism that sets aside the academic and the technical for the sake of a greater aesthetic and relational concordance with that of the madness transmitted by the story itself.

Germán Tagle (Santiago, Chile, 1976) returns to Madrid's Daniel Cuevas, where he held his first exhibition two years ago, with El territorio portátil, a show in which the Chilean artist returns to the axes of landscape, painting and culture that have been the backbone of his latest productions.

El Museo de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) presenta la exposición Leonilson: Ahora y Oportunidades, dedicada al artista, que fue figura clave en la escena brasileña de finales del siglo XX. La muestra abarca sus últimos años creativos, donde explora temas de amor, pérdida y la fragilidad humana con una voz íntima y única.

Héctor Zamora (Mexico City, Mexico, 1974) navigates between opposing concepts. His particular interest in the incessant search, or in the eagerness of understanding, for conceptual equilibrium serves as an engine for a creative explosion in the search for that fragile space that results between actions and intentions, between should and being. In Emergencia, his first solo exhibition at Madrid's Albarrán Bourdais, the Mexican artist manages to capture in several dimensions that almost obsessive vocation of his personal struggle between the opposite poles that have been shaping his proposal.

There seems to be, and increasingly so, a constant and growing debate in the social sphere about labor relations and the impact of work on people. Almost absolute concepts in current narratives such as work-life balance or resilience lack the necessary background to create that conversation. However, in order to build precisely on them, the research being done on the impact and culture of work in this new revision that Postmodernity leads to value proposals such as the one Allegra Pacheco (San Jose, Costa Rica, 1986) lands in her conceptual Dear Salaryman, which in its latest evolution is exhibited at the Museo La Neomudéjar in Madrid.

The artistic collective from Rio de Janeiro OPAVIVARÁ! intervenes in the space of the Capilla de Afuera of the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville with its Rede social, a sensorial and materialized symbology with which the Brazilians invite the spectator to place himself in a position to negotiate and cooperate with his fellow men and women. The intervention, consisting of the unfolding of fabric hammocks that acquire the rhythm and cadence that the visitor imprints with his movement and presence and that adds sounds of snoring, follows the group's premise of building spaces and devices that offer a collaborative experience.

The two venues of MEMORIA gallery enter into a necessary dialogue by hosting the individual but connected exhibitions of Gustavo Pérez (Mexico City, Mexico, 1950) and Lin Calle (Hubei, China, 1994), who put on the table, from their techniques and perspectives, a debate of thought on the impoverishment and extinction of contemporary imaginaries.

From her different interdisciplinary perspectives, Cecilia Paredes (Lima, Peru, 1950) lands in Blanca Berlin with a collection of images that deal with imaginary cartographies, displacements and human relations in their conceptual part, materialized, above all, on canvas as the main exhibition material. In Historias errantes (Wandering Stories), the Peruvian artist bets on recovering graphic materials anchored in antiquity, such as astrological charts, engravings of discoveries and maps, which become, after the manipulation of the parts, absolute compositions of impossible -but also aesthetic- iconography.

Stefan Brüggemann (Mexico City, Mexico, 1975) disembarks at Casa de México with Dos líneas (fe), a series that is understood as an installation and that starts from the impact and the apparent simplicity exposed to develop the concept of inheritance and its satellites. The Mexican conceptual artist uses the power reflected by symbols, religion and history, an element that he deploys, sometimes explicitly, in his large-format works.

As part of the 20th anniversary of BAphoto, the art fair dedicated exclusively to photography in Buenos Aires, the NEXT | Out of Focus section celebrates its tenth edition in 2024. Since its creation, this section has been a key space to promote the visibility of emerging galleries and artists, functioning as a platform that connects Argentine photography with the international scene. Throughout these ten years, NEXT | Out of Focus has played a fundamental role in positioning emerging galleries and generating links with larger art circuits, contributing to BAphoto and Pinta's goal of promoting Latin American art in the world.