CHILEAN PHOTOGRAPHY TAKES CENTER STAGE AT PHOTOESPAÑA

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.

For those of us who have followed the creative paths of Ana Tiscornia, we are very familiar with the many inventive forms and materials the artist has employed to refer to the architecture of place. The architecture of place may have been a building or a section of it; it may have been a street. Esquina / Corner of 2010, for example, is a complex paper collage of cut-out floor plans, densely layered to represent collapsed structures. This collage features a small red dot signaling the end of a street, a specific place no longer recognizable.

ABRA gallery has inaugurated TO TAIMA OR NOT TO TAIMA, the first solo exhibition in Venezuela by artist María Elena Pombo. Conceived as an interpretation of an archaeological site, the show brings together sculptures, objects, and archival gestures that explore the Venezuelan diaspora through a sensitive and material lens.

Galería Elvira González in Madrid presents Gego. Line, Form and Space, an exhibition dedicated to the work of Gego (born Gertrud Goldschmidt, Hamburg, Germany, 1912 – Caracas, Venezuela, 1994), featuring 45 works on paper and four sculptures that reflect her exploration of space, line, and structure. The show brings together pieces from different periods of the artist’s career, spanning from the 1950s—when she began her artistic journey and discovered her fascination with the line—to the early 1990s.

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.

The Palau Martorell in Barcelona is hosting Fernando Botero. Un maestro universal (Fernando Botero. A Universal Master), the most comprehensive exhibition of paintings by Fernando Botero (Medellín, Colombia, 1932 – Monte Carlo, Monaco, 2023) ever held in Spain. This exhibition offers a detailed exploration of the Colombian artist’s career, highlighting his mastery of various painting techniques and the scope of his artistic output.

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.

MAM Chiloé opens the sixteenth edition of Vutamuseo, a cycle of exhibitions that celebrates the diversity of artistic perspectives through five proposals that intertwine color exploration, pedagogy, photography, and reflections on memory and environment.