BOTERO'S PAINTING IN DETAIL AT PALAU MARTORELL

Joana Vasconcelos (Paris, France, 1971) walks that fine aesthetic line between the overwhelming and the excessive. The artist does not hide her intentions—she never has—and if the ornate effect of her works is what she aims for, then the mission is accomplished. When faced with a production that is so clearly personal and deliberate, the setting can only serve to further amplify the challenge her installations pose to our ideas of beauty and artistic harmony.

Chile will be the guest country at this year’s PHotoESPAÑA. For the first time in its history, the international festival includes a dedicated national section, with four major figures in Chilean photography taking the spotlight. The event will feature major exhibitions of work by Lotty Rosenfeld, Julia Toro, Michael Mauney, and Martín Gusinde. These exhibitions—held across venues in Madrid and Santander—offer audiences a powerful encounter with a body of work deeply shaped by the country’s history and social fabric.

The RAC Foundation presents, at its headquarters in Pontevedra, Expedition Camellias: Herbal of Artificial Plants, a solo show by Alberto Baraya (Bogotá, Colombia, 1968), originating from the Artist-in-Residence program developed by the foundation. The exhibition features a group of twelve works resulting from a research project on the camellia—a flower native to China and Japan that has become an essential element in the landscapes, gardens, and parks of western Galicia.

Formatocómodo presents Nervio Blando (Soft Nerve), an exhibition by Rafaela Salgueiro (Mogi das Cruzes, Brazil, 1991) and Theo Firmo (São Paulo, Brazil, 1983), where the duo showcases their most recent joint work for the first time in Spain. The two artists, from different backgrounds, have been collaborating since 2023, united by a shared interest in the human body as a contemporary subject of research and reflection.

The Botin Center, in Santander, is hosting the exhibition Maruja Mallo: mascara y compás (Maruja Mallo: Mask and Compass), a show that vindicates, through a broad selection of works from her most relevant periods, the figure of Maruja Mallo (Vivero, Spain, 1902 – Madrid, Spain, 1995). This exhibition delves into the legacy of the artist, a body of work which, like her own persona, has recently been the subject of revisions and visibility efforts to better integrate her trajectory into art historiography.

The Casa de México Foundation in Spain is hosting, through the second week of June, a must-see exhibition from the Jumex Collection—one of the most significant contemporary art collections in Latin America. Titled Éramos felices y no lo sabíamos (We Were Happy and Didn't Know It), the exhibition revisits the vibrant artistic scene of 1990s Mexico, offering a re-reading of one of the most dynamic periods in the country’s contemporary art history.

Ría, Jorge Satorre’s (Mexico City, Mexico, 1979) first exhibition in Spain, can be approached as a compendium of the sublimation of his ideas and research into the conceptual and material limits of the different practices he has engaged in. The show, curated by Max Andrews and Uruguayan Mariana Cánepa Luna for the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, is thus conceived as an immersive space in which those very boundaries are blurred in favor of a deeper observation of processes.

Multidisciplinary artist Bárbara Sánchez-Kane (Mérida, Mexico, 1987) presents ¿Cuántos ángeles caben en la punta de un alfiler? (How Many Angels Fit on the Tip of a Pin?), her first solo show at Collegium—a center for the creation, research, and display of contemporary art, known for its residencies. With Sánchez-Kane’s project, Collegium inaugurates its new role as a museum. All the pieces, curated by José Esparza Chong Cuy, were created on site, and their placement within the Church of San Martín fosters a dialogue with the building’s symbolic and historical character.