Notes related to Madrid

An Interview with La Chola Poblete

The institution is reinforcing its commitment to Latin American art with three exhibitions that, like the thematic lines underpinning this season, will explore the body, memory, and participation.

The program will select three projects at the intersection of art, design, science, and technology, with a stipend of €10,000. The deadline is September 27, 2026.

The Puerto Rican artist explores in Madrid the historical, cultural, and political tensions that define the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States through a highly symbolic visual language.

A Madrid exhibition brings together Trini Energici's material research, in which her work explores the transformation of materials as a metaphor for memory, territory, and change. 

The renowned installation by the Mexican artist transforms the exhibition space into an immersive experience through the unsettling arrangement of thousands of black paper butterflies, exploring the tension between beauty, collectivity, and perception.

The Dominican-Mexican photographer explores the social and territorial transformations of Mexico through a critical and serial photographic practice in a major exhibition presented as part of PhotoEspaña.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents a selection of more than fifty participatory, reconfigurable and conceptually driven works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, activating a contemporary reading of his practice that exceeds both curatorial boundaries and established discursive frameworks.

The call for submissions, open until May 31, is aimed at creators residing in Spain and invites them to design performative tours and workshops in dialogue with “Cautín,” the exhibition by the Mapuche trans artist.

Fundación, by Marlon de Azambuja, transforms one of La Casa Encendida’s towers into a walk-through sculptural installation. Aiming to reflect on the act of founding and the search for what underpins knowledge, the work questions the divisions between reason and sensation and proposes the exhibition space as an experiential environment.

The Mexican artist reinterprets colonial-themed prints by Theodor de Bry to question the construction of otherness and denounce neocolonial violence and contemporary conflicts.

Nombrar el mundo reconsiders painting through a political and affective perspective, expanding the canvas as textile toward sculptural and sonic dimensions as a gesture of resistance.

Jorge Volpi, after one year as Artistic Director of Contemporánea Condeduque, reflects on programming through a multidisciplinary narrative and how it fosters dialogue while giving Latin American art a central role in Madrid’s cultural scene.

La lechuza de Minerva reflects on the power of cultural institutions in the contemporary context and creates a space where proposals by Dagoberto Rodríguez, Regina Silveira, and Los Carpinteros, among others, coexist in order to re-read the trajectory of the institution itself.

Today, those who walk through the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York encounter a welcome surprise: canvases of undeniable visual strength hanging alongside figures such as Rothko or Tàpies. These are works by Sarah Grilo, recently acquired by these institutions. Nearly two decades after her passing, the artist has finally assumed the place of honor her career deserved.

ARCOmadrid 2026 appears to reinforce its position in the global art market by consolidating a distinctive identity in contrast to the major internationalized art fairs, with Latin America as its anchor. Its capacity to generate cultural and market narratives from this positioning has been key to understanding its current role and evaluating the potential risks of its model.

Giana De Dier presents an exhibition in Madrid that proposes a visual reflection on memory. Through archival imagery, appropriation, and the technique of collage, the Panamanian artist reconstructs the affective memory of El Terraplén in response to its recent transformation.

The Complutense Art Center explores the work of Quisqueya Henríquez, a practice rich both technically and conceptually, which employs social critique, creolization, and multidisciplinary semantics as analytical tools for the discourse of the Caribbean.

La vida se mueve delves into Pablo Reinoso’s most recognizable artistic practice: the transformation of everyday objects into sculptural works that explore existential fragility in dialogue with space and surrealism.

Máscara y compás underscores the importance of Maruja Mallo’s Latin American exile as a key stage in her artistic renewal, during which her avant-garde language expanded through the integration of the cultural and symbolic realities of Latin America.

The Fundación Casa de México in Spain hosts Re/Generación, a new installation from the Black Mirror / Espejo Negro series produced by Pedro Lasch (Mexico City, Mexico, 1975) and curated by the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico (INAH). Originating from an initiative originally produced by the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina, in 2007, the series has been transformed through various techniques, evolving its language toward a narrative that makes it impossible to separate past and present, as well as spectator and proposal.

The Juan March Foundation in Madrid presents an extensive and analytical exhibition on Robert Rauschenberg (Port Arthur, USA, 1925–Captiva, USA, 2008), focusing on the use of image and photography in his work. The exhibition, structured from a novel curatorial perspective, reinterprets the production of one of the great masters of contemporary art, highlighting it as the outcome of an essentially photographic practice.

The Cultural Institute of Mexico in Spain presents at its headquarters in Madrid the exhibition El silencio sedimenta (Silence Sediments), a look at the most recent production of Vanessa Enríquez (Mexico City, Mexico, 1973). The show revolves around six literary fragments that reflect on her work, materiality, and creative processes.

The presentation of the current season at Madrid’s Reina Sofía Museum has underscored the strategic importance of Latin America and its artistic practices in the vision of Spain’s largest public contemporary art institution. This is not something new, since its commitment as a public museum has incorporated the Ibero-American narrative as an essential part of its historical account from the beginning. However, what does stand out is the accentuation of its critical essence in a program —the first fully developed under the direction of Manuel Segade, with the exception of a single exhibition— which introduces new elements.

The Lázaro Galdiano Museum in Madrid hosts the first exhibition in Spain of veteran photographer and visual artist Julia Toro (Talca, Chile, 1933). Her photographic production yields to both simplicity and wonder, frameworks that delimit and amplify the everyday themes she addresses. The protagonists of this cyclical, customary flow of life in her work are diverse, and their problems and experiences drift among the concepts of love, pain, memory, and relationship with their surroundings.

The Official College of Architects of Madrid (COAM) is hosting No tan lejos (Not So Far Away), an exhibition by Emilio Pemjean (Santiago, Chile, 1971), which continues to explore his characteristic artistic approach that blends photography, design, architecture, and painting. In this exhibition, the Chilean artist presents a series of imagined and reconstructed spaces, virtually brought back to life through memory, which makes their reconstruction possible.

The Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid presents Somos raíces (We Are Roots), an exploration of the creative worlds of Santiago Yahuarcani (Pucaurquillo, Peru, 1960) and Nereyda López (Pebas, Peru, 1965), two of the most prominent figures in contemporary indigenous art. Both artists draw from the oral traditions and cosmologies of their respective peoples—the Uitoto in Yahuarcani’s case, and the Tikuna and Cocama in López’s—to give voice to languages of resistance.

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.

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.