Notes related to España

Contemplando es como fuimos cambiando (Contemplating is how we changed) is the exhibition, the first one in Spain promoted by an institution, that the CICC Tabakalera in San Sebastian is dedicating to Gabriel Chaile (San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina, 1985), one of the most prominent names in contemporary Latin American sculpture. This proposal is intended to take an extensive look at his work, from his beginnings to his latest works produced in Lisbon, and which is recognizable by his monumental adobe, clay and metal pieces that reflect the morphology of the pre-Columbian ceramics of his native region.

ALTTRA Foundation organizes in three spaces in Palma, on the island of Mallorca, an exhibition that addresses the theme of insularity and its role and idiosyncrasy in a globalized world through several works by Cildo Meireles (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1948). The works chosen, corresponding to five different periods of the artistic production of one of the referents of Brazilian neo-conceptualism, trace a journey through some of the themes and investigations that the artist has developed throughout his life, from fortune and chance to the perception of the physically invisible but perceptible, such as sound, or the relationship between space and its use.

Arte al Día takes a look at the curatorial selection that highlights works by Ibero-American galleries in the NEXT, RADAR and Main sections of Pinta Miami. The curatorial team for the 2024 edition of the fair is integrated by Irene Gelfman -global curator of Pinta and co-curator of FORO and Special Project-, Giuliana Vidarte -curator of NEXT and co-curator of FORO and Special Project- and Angelica Arbelaez -curator of RADAR.

The Pinta Miami 2024 edition -from December 5 to 8- presents proposals that enhance the Latin American gene. Arte al Día highlights four galleries from four Latin American countries: Petrus Gallery in Puerto Rico, Proyecto H in Spain and Mexico, Salar Gallery in Bolivia and Judas Gallery in Chile.

Barcelona's Center of Image La Virreina (La Virreina Centre de la Imatge) is dedicating an extensive exhibition to Regina Silveira (Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1939), one of the multimedia artists and key figures of Latin American conceptual art. Within the exhibition line of the center, which advocates the exploration of the aesthetic and ideological languages of images, this show curated by Isabella Lenzi covers a wide range of the Brazilian artist's research, experimentation and artistic production, particularly that developed with technical reproduction techniques and the circulation of images.

Fundación Casa de Mexico in Spain hosts the exhibition Modern Art of Mexico, with funds from the Blaisten Collection and curated by Daniel Garza Usabiaga, which takes an interesting look at the country's 20th century production through the eyes of Margarita Nelken (Madrid, Spain, 1894-Mexico City, Mexico, 1968).

The exhibition Beyond the Single Image. Spanish Photography from the Foto Colectania Collection, Barcelona, at The Marguiles Collection at the Warehouse in Miami, presents 150 works by 36 artists from the Foto Colectania Collection, that currently comprises more than 3,000 photographs by Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese authors, making it undoubtedly one of the most comprehensive private photography collections in the Iberian Peninsula. 

Isabella Despujols (Barquisemeto, Venezuela, 1994), Venezuelan artist based in Brazil, uses her artistic references for the realization of her latest series of works, a set made this year where textiles and embroidery are especially relevant, as well as the formal fact that they reflect. In them is palpable the conversation that he intends to maintain with those styles and languages that were fundamental in the countries to which he circumscribes his personal experience.

Based on the biologicist theories on territoriality and the relationships derived from living beings with their immediate environment, the Angeles Baños gallery from Badajoz proposes an exhibition project to three Latin American artists so that, through their experiences and their personal vision, they can materialize and express those feelings of territoriality, and always from the parallelism of the human being with the rest of living beings.

The Museum of Pontevedra exhibits Vento (wind, in Galician), the proposal that the artist Alberto Baraya (Bogota, Colombia, 1968) has developed and now shows at its headquarters in the Castelao Building as part of the cycle of exhibitions Infiltracións. This program aims to carry out specific projects that have as their backbone the dialogue arising from research and work with pieces from the collection of the Galician institution to promote re-readings on it.

Sol Calero (Caracas, Venezuela, 1982) uses the guanabana, a fruit endemic to Central America and the Caribbean, to symbolically instrumentalize the creation of a representation of the feelings of belonging, home, everyday life and stereotypes through the wide conquest of the spaces of the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, transformed for the occasion into visual and popular references of a well-known and recognized Latin America.

Nebulosa de la calabaza is the title of the first solo exhibition presented in Spain by Tabita Rezaire (Paris, France, 1989), an artist living in French Guiana. Renowned for her use of new media and multidisciplinarity to explore the relationship between contemporary worlds transited from technology and their relationship with the most ancestral and spiritual environment, the Guyanese-heritage artist focuses her production on activism from the perspective of denunciation from feminism and decolonization as key points.

The Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art (CAAC) is showing Continuum or the appearance of the parts and the whole in its recovered space in the cellars of the institution's complex in Seville, an exhibition whose origin is to be sought in Profundis, the proposal that Colombian Delcy Morelos (Tierralta, Colombia, 1967) made for this same center this year and that served as a framework to sublimate, from the analysis, the dialogue beyond the material and the relationship she kept with her collaborators when it came to putting together her recent exhibition.

In an art industry that increasingly advocates following the lines established by cultural policies, it is always comforting to return to thesis themes, to environments that draw from social and historiographic sources, of course, but also from myths and a well-understood anthropology. You can go deeper in subtitles and lines or you can put together a skeleton, but the overview can also be a reward these days.

“I imagine the museum as an archipelago. It is not a continent, but an archipelago (...) The idea today is to put the world in contact with the world, to put some parts of the world in contact with other parts of the world... We must multiply the number of worlds inside museums”. Édouard Glissant (Sainte-Marie, Martinique, 1929-Paris, France, 2011) expressed his vision of museum functionality in this metaphorical way in his work Poetics of Relationship (1990).

Travesía Cuatro hosts at its Madrid headquarters Surf and Turf, the fifth exhibition that the gallery dedicates to Milena Múzquiz (Tijuana, Mexico, 1972), that gathers, with about thirty works, the continuity of the production that began after the aesthetic and technical change produced by the end of Los Súper Elegantes, a musical group that he shared with the Argentine Martiniano López Crozet, and which represented a platform that brought together his purest expression through voice and body, as well as with the aesthetic possibilities of costumes and image.

The DA2 hosts the last stage of the itinerancy of the Luciano Méndez Sánchez Contemporary Cuban Art Collection, a cycle of exhibitions that the collection started in 2019 in Spain in this institution and that reflects, through different curatorial lines, the realities and attitudes around contemporary art in Cuba.

Rutas relacionales (Relational Routes) is the long-term collective with which the Lucía Mendoza gallery celebrates its tenth anniversary and with which it intends to raise awareness, through the work of about 40 artists, about several of the current thematic and philosophical axes, those that trace their need from the relationship of mankind with its environment. In these axes, we find lines of argument that deal with ecology, society and economies, passing through everything that composes them, such as political processes or the construction of identity. 

The Niemeyer Center, in the Asturian city of Aviles, hosts Tokyo Blues hacia Gritos Sordos (From Tokyo Blues to Deaf Cries), an exhibition by Brazilian photographer Miguel Rio Branco (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, 1946) that traces a journey through his work of crossed images and pieces that were conceived from his personal experience on a trip to Japan, a country whose culture and names in cinema, art and architecture have always fascinated the artist.

Mercedes Azpilicueta (La Plata, Argentina, 1981) lands with her dancing tables at the Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía (C3A) in an exhibition curated by Verónica Rossi and Jimena Blázquez. A visual and performance artist based in Amsterdam, her artistic practice proposes in her multi-layered works a meeting place between the past and the present through her protagonists and their expressions, some physical -but not corporeal-, such as voices; others, material, such as forms and texts; and others of a more intangible nature such as memory and remembrance.

Pamen Pereira (Ferrol, Spain, 1963) unfolds her project Don't give up at Artizar gallery in Tenerife, a show made up of fourteen pieces that make up a total, but that must be seen from the prism of combination and language. However, the artist advocates for observing what is hidden behind the relationship of her works, the selection and the dialogue that the tour offers us.

Casa de América is hosting three interconnected exhibitions in Madrid until November 30 that investigate and show the influence of the arts and the roots of pre-Columbian cultures in contemporary art and architecture. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.