Notes related to Spain

By Álvaro de Benito

The Casa de México Foundation in Spain is hosting Cuando habla la luz (When Light Speaks), the first retrospective of Graciela Iturbide (Mexico City, 1942) since she received the 2025 Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts. Curated by Juan Rafael Coronel Rivera, the exhibition brings together 115 works spanning from 1972 to 2017.

By Álvaro de Benito

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 Amazonian 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.

By Álvaro de Benito

Manuel Segade (La Coruña, Spain, 1977) celebrates two years this month at the helm of Spain’s largest public museum of contemporary art. Since taking over as director of the Reina Sofía, he has implemented a series of exhibition and institutional strategies that have gradually shaped the museum’s strong personality and clear direction. In addition to progress on gender and feminist issues, decolonial thinking plays an important role in his vision—always from a perspective that necessarily looks to both sides of the Atlantic. Segade never seems to lose his enthusiasm, as evidenced by his expression and way of speaking. He welcomes us into his office at the Reina Sofía to finalize ideas and details, and to discuss the museum’s positioning and approach regarding Latin America.

By Álvaro de Benito

The Museum of America in Madrid is hosting El sueño del jaguar (The Dream of the Jaguar), an exhibition curated by visual artist Fredi Casco (Asunción, Paraguay, 1967) and photographer Fernando Allen (Asunción, Paraguay, 1957), which brings together artistic, ethnographic, and scientific perspectives on the jaguar and its symbolic and ecological significance.

From June 19 to 28, Madrid’s Reina Sofía Museum will host Los reyes de la página roja (The Kings of the Red Page), a program dedicated to contemporary audiovisual productions from El Salvador. Part of the series Other Visions of Central America, this selection has been curated by Salvadoran artist Patricio Majano, this year’s resident at the Instituto Cáder de Arte Centroamericano—an initiative promoted by the Reina Sofía Museum Foundation and the museum itself to support research and dissemination of Central American art.

Terraphilia—a term combining terra (earth) with philia (love and friendship)—evokes a deep-rooted connection of affect, care, and responsibility toward the earth and its multitudes of inhabitants. In a time of planetary unmaking and gaping inequalities, the exhibition turns to art to orient us toward transformative ways of being—mobilizing interspecies kinship, new forms of collectivity, and practices of planetary love. 

The Andalusian Center of Contemporary Art (CAAC) presents Sensemayá. Cánticos para matar a la Culebra (Sensemaya. Chants to kill the snake), the first solo institutional exhibition in Spain by Claribel Calderius (Havana, Cuba, 1986). Conceived specifically for the San Bruno Chapel, the project is a site-specific intervention that draws on the space’s historical and spiritual resonance—qualities that align seamlessly with the symbolic universe of the Cuban artist.

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.

Multidisciplinary artist Bárbara Sánchez-Kane (Mérida, Mexico, 1987) presents ¿Cuántos ángeles caben en la punta de un alfiler? (How Many Angels Fit on the Tip of a Pin?), her first solo show at Collegium—a center for the creation, research, and display of contemporary art, known for its residencies. With Sánchez-Kane’s project, Collegium inaugurates its new role as a museum. All the pieces, curated by José Esparza Chong Cuy, were created on site, and their placement within the Church of San Martín fosters a dialogue with the building’s symbolic and historical character.

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.