Reviews
LATIN AMERICAN ARTISTS IN SPAIN: NOTES FROM A RESEARCH PROJECT
By Mónica Sotos
What are the successive diasporas of Latin American artists to Spain from the final years before the beginning of the 21st century to the present about? Article 1 of a 3-part series.
“BATUCADA,” MARCELO EVELIN’S PERFORMANCE: A STORY
In Casa do Povo's basement, Marcelo Evelin’s performance unleashes a ritual of bodies, rhythms, and nudity that allows no anticipation. An experience that demands looking, breathing, and moving through the present without guide or return.
SÃO PAULO: A JOURNEY THROUGH GALLERIES, STUDIOS, AND RESIDENCIES
Like any big city, in São Paulo everything happens at once: galleries, residencies, studios, and exhibitions weave together in an electric network that nurtures local artists and connects them with global circuits. The city works like a node: intense, vibrant, inexhaustible.
ANGLES, CROSSINGS, MOVEMENT, JUXTAPOSITION: THE 36TH SÃO PAULO BIENNIAL
The São Paulo Biennial opened its 36th edition with a mix of proposals that invite a return to the senses: textures are highlighted, sounds resonate, and at times even scents appear. With a large number of commissioned works, the curatorial approach—led by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung—was guided by several threads, all centered on the idea of “humanity as practice”.
ELLIOT AND ERICK JIMENEZ: TWINS WITH A VISION
By Violeta Lozada
For the first time, twin brothers Elliot and Erick Jiménez step into a museum as an artistic duo, presenting a body of work that is both personal and deeply spiritual. Identical twins with identical passions, they work through photography to explore themes of memory, identity, and tradition, but with a profound layer of meaning rooted in their spiritual practice of Lucumí, a syncretic Afro-Caribbean religion born in late nineteenth-century Cuba. Emerging from the fusion of Yoruba, Catholicism, and Spiritism, Lucumí continues to shape lives across generations of the Cuban diaspora, and in the case of the Jiménez brothers, it has become both inspiration and guide.
THE HYPNOTIC NATURE OF AN EXPOSED STAGECRAFT
Just steps from the door, I heard the echoes of Tramoya. Curiosity guided my body toward the gallery, stealing from me the chance to prepare for the detours and fragmentations the works would provoke—and for the attempts to piece together those fragments within my own body.
GYULA KOSICE: INTERGALACTIC, AN EXHIBITION THAT RESHAPES HIS VISIONARY CONTRIBUTION
By Adriana Herrera Téllez, PhD
Gyula Kosice: Intergalactic is one of those axial exhibitions that unsettle the boundaries of the usual narratives of art history by incorporating visions that broaden our understanding of the contributions of foundational artists who, like this creator—born in today’s Slovenia in 1924 and later naturalized in Argentina—have not been sufficiently incorporated into the global narrative of concrete art.
SOFT RESISTANCE
By Daniela Arroyo
On Atardecer en un bosque (Sunset in a Forest), the latest solo exhibition by Tadeo Muleiro at the Luis Perlotti Sculpture Museum in Buenos Aires, curated by Jen Zapata.
THE AMERICAN DREAM, REIMAGINED BY DIMITHRY VICTOR
By Violeta Lozada
What does the “American Dream” really mean? For some, it’s white houses with new furniture and success stories. For others, especially immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean, it’s a more complicated mix of hopes, struggles, and reinvention. That’s exactly the conversation Haitian-American artist Dimithry Victor brings to the table in his exhibition The American Dream at the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale.
MEMORY, PHANTASY AND RESISTANCE IN NAUFUS RAMÍREZ-FIGUEROA
Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa (Guatemala City, Guatemala, 1978) has long warranted a mid-career exhibition such as the one hosted by the Museo Reina Sofía. His ongoing activity and presence in institutions and performances over recent years have positioned the Guatemalan artist as a key figure in the development and visibility of contemporary Central American art beyond its geographic framework.
BETWEEN A DRAGON AND A VIRGIN, AGAINST DOMESTICATED IMAGINATION
If there were no way to create something new—believing everything has already been done—if every form of creative intelligence were exhausted, then it would be time to unearth hidden worlds.
BEN SHAHN, ON NONCONFORMITY
Ben Shahn, On Nonconformity is the artist’s first retrospective in the United States in almost fifty years. Impeccably curated and designed, the exhibition aims to bring renewed critical attention to one of America’s most consequential modernists.
THE ARCHIVE HITS THE STREETS: DISOBEDIENCE IS ALWAYS POLITICAL
After its acclaimed presentation at the 60th Venice Biennale, the Disobedience Archive lands at PROA21 with a new configuration. What in Italy took the form of an animated pre-cinematic machine —The Zoetrope— that drew the viewer into a visual experience, now adopts in Buenos Aires a more intimate and austere format.
DEPARTAMENTO 112: A STORY, A BIRD, AN ENCOUNTER
The artist and the gallerist were drinking mate on Fleming Avenue in Martínez, in front of the gallery, trying to hold onto the warmth of a cool autumn sun. That simple, everyday, and sincere image foreshadowed the exhibition at Departamento 112.
A NEW REVIEW ON CLAUDIA ANDUJAR’S A SÔNIA
The Elba Benítez Gallery in Madrid is currently hosting an exhibition of photographs from A Sônia, a project by Claudia Andujar (Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 1931), created in 1971. This body of work stands as one of the most significant early explorations into the creative manipulation of the photographic snapshot. For this occasion, the exhibition focuses on a carefully curated selection of images that establish a dialogue of balance, intensity, and chromatic richness with the surrounding space.
JONATHAS DE ANDRADE IN MOTION, AT CONDEDUQUE
The videographic universe of Jonathas de Andrade (Maceió, Brazil, 1982) is only one part of his broader artistic practice. It is, of course, significant—complementing other worlds that shape the ideology and imaginary embedded in both the work and the persona of the Brazilian artist. For this reason, the selection of exclusively audiovisual works under the title Tiempo, sueño, olor (Time, Dream, Scent), on view at Madrid’s Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque, offers a concise, representative, and necessary approach that ultimately bears witness to a part for the whole.
RE-ENCHANTING SURREALIST NARRATIVES
With major exhibitions such as the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams (2022), Surrealism Beyond Borders at Tate Modern and the Metropolitan Museum in the same period, Surrealism at the Centre Pompidou (which closed in 2025), and various revivals of lesser-known figures and centenary celebrations of the movement, surrealism has gained renewed momentum and has (somewhat) emerged from technical archives and private collections around the world.
A DISPLAY OF PANAMANIAN DREAMS: ACTIVATIONS IN THE CITY OF ART
As part of Pinta Panamá Art Week, Lo que sueña toda vida takes place—an exhibition project that reflects on ways of living in the Central American country. Curated by Juan Canela and Emiliano Valdés, the program features a series of artistic actions by Felipe Gómez and Jonathan Harker, the Enlaces Program, Libertad Rojo, and Humberto Vélez.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE IMMATERIAL IN JORGE SATORRE
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.
THE PALATIAL EXTRAVAGANCE OF VASCONCELOS
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.
DA-LI-LA: THE MALLEABILITY OF THE FIXED
From White Plaster to Colorful Textiles, Dalila Puzzovio (1942, Buenos Aires) has always known how to appreciate broken bodies and dress the living. While some destroy, others build is the title of one of her photographs—a phrase that runs through her remarkable artistic career.
ANA TISCORNIA: NEIGHBORS
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.
YESTERDAY AND TOMORROW, INSIDE AND OUTSIDE: SPECIAL PROJECT AT PINTA LIMA
A system. An architecture. A way of setting out the guidelines that connect millenary myths with the manifestations provided by the present. Lo que este paisaje puede decir sobre el futuro (What this landscape can say about the future), Pinta Lima's Special Project, is an oracle: a sacred space that reveals the union between what is and what can be.
FOUR ARTWORKS THAT TRACE TERESA BURGA'S REVOLUTIONARY JOURNEY
The enduring legacy of Teresa Burga (Iquitos, 1935 – Lima, 2021) is celebrated at the Latin American art fair Pinta Lima, where she was selected as the tribute artist for the Special Project, curated by Miguel A. López. The exhibition brings together, for the first time, various moments of her production between 1966 and 2020, showcasing the intelligence, boldness, and versatility of an artist who was not always recognized or understood in her time.
JONATHAS DE ANDRADE: “L'ART DE NE PAS ETRE VORACE”
La Commanderie de Peyrassol presents a monographic exhibition by Jonathas de Andrade - Maceió, Brazil, resident in Recife -, within the framework of the cultural season, held this year under the aegis of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Culture of Brazil and France. Philippe Austruy - owner of the site and collector of contemporary art -, echoing the desire for a “multidisciplinary, innovative and committed” season and the reflections and contemporary issues defined as thematic axes, in particular, climate and ecological transition, invited the artist to design an exhibition in this vast wine-growing domain in the south of France.
KUITCA 86: THE VESTIGES OF MATTER
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.
NECESSARY ANCESTRALITY IN ANTONIO PICHILLÁ
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.
LATIN AMERICA ON THE SURREALIST PERIPHERY: A HISTORIOGRAPHY BEYOND BRETON
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.
JORGE PARDO: COLOR, SPACE, AND PERCEPTION AT ELBA BENÍTEZ
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.
CELEBRATING LE PARC AT ALBARRÁN BOURDAIS
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.
TRADITION, IDENTITY AND CONTEMPORARY LANGUAGE IN ÉDGAR CALEL
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.
PERCEPTION AND QUOTIDIANITY IN LEANDRO ERLICH
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.
FILM ON PAPER: BETWEEN FICTION AND PHOTOGRAPHY
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.
