Notes related to Spain

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 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.

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 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.

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.

Chile will be the guest country at this year’s PHotoESPAÑA. For the first time in its history, the international festival includes a dedicated national section, with four major figures in Chilean photography taking the spotlight. The event will feature major exhibitions of work by Lotty Rosenfeld, Julia Toro, Michael Mauney, and Martín Gusinde. These exhibitions—held across venues in Madrid and Santander—offer audiences a powerful encounter with a body of work deeply shaped by the country’s history and social fabric.

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.

The Spanish artist known for challenging socio-cultural conventions and exploring the power relations embedded in urban imagery and text presents the exhibition Muntadas Lugar Público in Brazil.

The Cervantes Institute in Madrid presents Roberto Fabelo. Grafomanía, an exhibition featuring 50 works by Roberto Fabelo (Guáimaro, Cuba, 1951), most of them related to literary worlds and dialogues with other artists. The exhibition includes references to Gabriel García Márquez, Miguel de Cervantes, Goya, and Hieronymus Bosch—figures of great influence on the Cuban artist’s work.

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.

The terraces of the Nouvel Building at the Reina Sofía Museum are being transformed into a new exhibition space. Under the title A Different Order: Utopian Geometry and Kinetic Art, the space will showcase two sculptural works by Jesús Rafael Soto and Edgar Negret, along with a third piece by Martín Chirino.

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 CAV La Neomudéjar Museum is in its final days of exhibiting Ecos del Vacío (Echoes of the Void), a project developed by Guatemalan filmmaker and artist Verónica Riedel during her artistic residency at Kárstica Espacio de Creación, in the town of Cañada del Hoyo, Cuenca.

The Cultural Institute of Mexico in Spain hosts the exhibition Estrategias de recuperación (Recovery Strategies), featuring three recent projects by the photographer. Including the series Las flores mueren dos veces (Flowers Die Twice, 2021–2024), Palimpsesto (2024–2025), and Maíz (Corn) (2023–present), the Mexican photographer explores the elements and causes that create distortion and fragmentation in memory.

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.

The Museo La Neomudéjar presents No hay más ciego que el que no quiere ver (No one is more blind than the one who refuses to see), a solo exhibition by Marisa Caichiolo (Santa Fe, Argentina, 1974). In this project, the artist explores and materializes pain and absence, primarily through embroidery. Drawing from her personal experiences, Caichiolo constructs narratives of resistance and instrumental memory to confront traumatic episodes—many of them rooted in forced disappearances.

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 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."

Maria Wills (Bogota, Colombia 1979) and Denilson Baniwa (Barcelos, Brazil, 1984) are the responsible for Wametisé: ideas for an amazofuturism, one of the special programs curated for ARCO 2025 and that navigates the Amazon and its growing impact on contemporary art. This proposal proposes a scenario of representation and dialogue through a selection of galleries and guest artists who will raise, through their works and their realities, the different conceptions of the Amazonian world and the possibilities of a collective future.

Madrid's Reina Sofia Museum, in collaboration with the Reina Sofia Museum Foundation, reinforces its growing involvement and strategy for the dissemination and study of Latin American contemporary art with the creation of the Cáder Institute of Central American Art (ICAC), dedicated to the research and dissemination of Central American art.

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.

The intervention Wasi Llamkha (Place and touch), by artist Andrea Canepa (Lima, Peru, 1980), stands on the South Patio of Madrid's Condeduque. This pavilion, designed as an ephemeral architectural structure, invites us to explore its sensorial value, far from the preeminence of the visual, and claims, by way of inspiration, the quipus, the forms of representation and recording of information from pre-Columbian Peru.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao hosts a retrospective exhibition of Tarsila do Amaral (Capivari, Brazil, 1886 - São Paulo, Brazil, 1973) focused on her conception and renovation of painting, as well as on her recognition as one of the key and most representative figures of the entry of avant-garde and modernizing pictorial languages in Latin America. A central name in Brazilian modernism, her style was consecrated as her own identity, a product of her desires and experiences, evoking both indigenous themes and the modernizing processes of a Brazil that was undergoing a constant transformation.

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.

Madrid's CentroCentro approaches the artistic production related to the Amazon with the exhibition Trópico sin tópico: Amazonas (Tropic without Topic: Amazon), curated by Halim Badawi (Barranquilla, Colombia, 1982), and with which it intends to facilitate new looks beyond the usual ones with which the European imaginary contemplates the indigenous legacy and its relation with the contemporary world.

Felipe Romero (Bogota, Colombia, 1992) usually shows in his photographic proposal a high interest in conflict zones. While the scenario reflects this palpable but still intangible tension, it also serves as a reflective framework where the conflict and its protagonists meet.

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.