Reviews

The sincere fiction crafted by the Argentine artist captivates and steals the voice of those who come to see it. Honest and raw, it reveals the indelible traces of history.

Antonio Pichillá (San Pedro de La Laguna, Guatemala) proposes a broad return to the atavistic and ancestral in his recent work, exhibited in the two venues of the Memoria gallery in Madrid under the title Abuela materna (Maternal Grandmother). This return should be understood beyond the mere construction or defense of an original identity, in order to encompass the full meaning the artist conveys through his work.

Amid the centenary of Surrealism, or at least from what is officially understood as its inception with the publication of The First Surrealist Manifesto by André Breton in 1924, it is truly significant to access an exhibition as profound as 1924: Other Surrealisms, presented by the MAPFRE Foundation in Madrid, which will later tour other locations. This exhibition is important for the centrifugal perspectives it presents, emphasizing the expansion of the main official—or officialism—ideas beyond Breton's boundaries and granting maximum importance to Latin America in the acceptance, production, and collaboration within the movement.

Elba Benítez Gallery in Madrid, in collaboration with Clarissa Bronfman, presents a must-see exhibition by Jorge Pardo (Havana, Cuba, 1963), featuring a selection of works designed and created specifically for the gallery space. Emphasizing the importance of space, the Cuban artist employs his signature multidisciplinary approach to explore how color and texture influence perception. To this end, the exhibition is arranged in areas that serve a dual purpose.

The Albarrán Bourdais gallery, at its Madrid venue, is hosting the exhibition En movimiento, by Julio Le Parc (Mendoza, Argentina, 1928). With a celebratory tone, as this is the first solo exhibition dedicated to the Argentine artist in Spain in 30 years, the show explores a fundamental part of the work of this master of kinetic and op-art and does so with a selection of several pieces that illustrate key periods. Without being a retrospective, there is something of that essence in the way the tour is presented, which proposes, through connected groups, an analysis of the connection between the past and the present.

The concern about how the surrounding affects not only the individual but also artistic production connects with the principle by which Édgar Calel (San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala, 1987) has developed a unique project from scratch at La Oficina gallery. Sueños guardados en granos de maíz brings us to a specific moment of materialization, but it expands toward all the vertices with which the artist works, delving above all into the importance of ancestry, identity, and the spirituality that is related to space.

La nevera en la sala (The Fridge in the Living Room) is the arrangement through which Leandro Erlich (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1973) reinterprets his vision of perception through architecture and everyday life at Prats Nogueras Blanchard. A recurring theme in this Argentine artist’s work, the pieces exhibited at the gallery’s Madrid headquarters do not belong to a new production but rather mark the first public presentation of a series of works that engage with realism and illusion, complemented by their location and functionality within the space.

Observing through George Friedmann’s lens allows one to grasp the power of photography and the charm of artistic fusion. Eso que llaman amor (That Which They Call Love) highlights the beauty of what is carefully constructed yet retains the fragility of the unexpected.

With strong gallery participation, ARCO is an interesting point to measure how the proposals reach the visitor and the collector. The choices based on aesthetic or commercial criteria create synergies that shape a fluid and sometimes circumstantial representation of each catalog. From Arte al Día, we delve into ten of those catalogs, expanded to variegated universes, monographs and dialogues that show a sample of the approach of Latin American galleries in their presence at the Madrid fair.

The Latin American presence at ARCO is consolidating year after year, establishing itself as a primary guiding thread beyond market trends, becoming a significant part of the identity of the Madrid fair. In this sense, the participating galleries in the various programs showcase well-established names as well as younger or more radical bets, shaping an ecosystem in which various productions can be analyzed.

The organization has entrusted Mexican curator José Esparza Chong Cuy with the development of Perfiles | Arte latinoamericano, a curated journey that highlights, through ten selected figures, the diversity of visual approaches. As the curator himself states, it offers "a broad panorama of how to identify as artists and build community, proposing new ways of making, thinking, and living together."

Within the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, dreams, stories, and ideas brought by Ofrenda still linger. Yet, even more present are the thoughts left suspended in the air by the audience.

Intricate between action and register, El Apartamento hosts Algo deja quien se va, the first solo exhibition in Spain by Reynier Leyva Novo (Havana, Cuba, 1983). Starting from the political concept of historical memory and linking it to the issues of power and colonialism, the artist unfolds in two well-differentiated series his proposal to approach these lines, and extends his networks to the impact (or influence) they have on the institutional and cultural fabric.

Madrid-based Maisterravalbuena proposes a vindication of the work of Sarah Grilo (Buenos Aires, Argentina,1917 - Madrid, Spain, 2007) through Soluciones para pensar, the second exhibition on this artist at the gallery. With a didactic and rediscovery vocation, the exhibition gathers a selection of paintings in different formats made between the 1960s and 1990s, many of them unpublished to the public. This work of selection and direct work of the gallery with the archive and the legacy of the Argentinean artist becomes fundamental in the structuring of the objective of creating opportunities for a greater knowledge of Grilo's work.

Located in KM 113 of the federal highway that connects Salina Cruz to Pinotepa Nacional, a remote creative jewel stands. Architecture, design, and art cohabit along this section of the Oaxacan coast. A mix of boutique accommodations, gastronomy, and contemporary art proposals enrich Puerto Escondido’s endowment of inspiration and creation.

The Hochschild Correa Collection boasts of being the most complete private collection of contemporary art from the Peruvian Amazon. Nevertheless, for more than a decade, it has been built on a varied and unrestricted collection, which has made it possible to bring together the different trends and techniques currently being used in the region, with a focus on dialogue and a certain relational patina among the works that make up the collection. 

About to turn 92, Anna Bella Geiger, from Rio de Janeiro, never ceases to attest to her robust experimental side with each new exhibition featuring snippets of her shifting production. Both in Brazil and abroad, in solo and group shows, her body of work remains indomitable, uncompromising and full of meaning.

The work that Lúa Coderch (Iquitos, Peru, 1982) has been doing around language takes over her recent solo show at Madrid's The Ryder Projects to consolidate a new relational vision of communicative practices. Exhausted and exuberant, title of this partially retrospective and almost thesis exhibition, also responds to the two apparently opposite moods, but with an inexorable link, of the vital needs that seep into contemporary society between individuals and a certain extimacy that, organically, seems to have been imposed.

Gabriel O'Shea (Metepec, Mexico, 1998) manages to delve into that huge and apparent dichotomy between the technological and the human (or the future and the real) in his most recent proposal at Hilario Galguera's Madrid headquarters, a series of paintings of high conceptual content that critically debate on several technical and thinking aspects.

Under the enlightening title of Los espacios del pánico (Estudios superficiales sobre el vacío y el color) (The spaces of panic-Surface studies on emptiness and color), the interesting individual exhibition that the Madrid gallery El Apartamento dedicates to Luis Enrique Lopez-Chavez (Manzanillo, Cuba, 1988) is developed as a thesis scenario for the almost scientific analysis that the Cuban artist has developed around the space of the void and the chromatic.

Museo Casa de la Moneda, in Madrid, celebrates in an exhibition the career of Liliana Porter (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1941) through several conceptual key points of it, designing a necessary route to cover, in a succinct but very representative way, one of the most relevant productions of the last decades of conceptual art.

The Reina Sofia Museum presents in the exhibition Opera to a Black Venus a necessary journey to the work of Grada Kilomba (Lisbon, Portugal, 1968), forming the most complete exhibition of her work to date in Spain. The Portuguese artist presents a complete discourse, mainly expressed through the different languages of movement, from the body to performance, but without leaving aside other narrative and artistic techniques with which she analytically presents a certain introspective look at the world of history.

Goya's Los Disparates preceded, or marked, painting's entry into modernity. Beyond this historiographical note, the series by the Aragonese master captures with masterful imagery the vicissitudes of irony, sarcasm and the darkness of a reality that has lasted through time to the present day. The plates of his etchings become the surface that deposits this reality, and the result, once impregnated, works as a full reminder of the origin of our essence, our fears and our actions.

Shocking and enigmatic, this is the first major retrospective in Europe that the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art presents of Olga de Amaral, a key figure in the Colombian art scene and Fiber Art. The exhibition brings together nearly 90 works created between the 1960s and the present, many of which have never been presented outside Colombia.