Notes related to Spain

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.

The first retrospective in Spain of Gabriela Bettini reflects on absence and the politics of forgetting through images that challenge official history.

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.

The exhibition brings together works created ad hoc by the artist in the city. Through them, she reinterprets craft and tradition from a contemporary perspective and invites the audience to understand sound as a language that redefines our relationship with the environment.

The exhibition by the Ecuadorian artist, featuring works created specifically for the Córdoba space, proposes a journey in which the viewer is invited to explore concepts such as migration, memory, and colonialism by moving through a space that brings together history and displacement.

La Neomudéjar presents over 130 works from the Fuentes Angarita Collection, mapping three decades of Latin American political art through themes of identity, gender, diaspora, and the memory of the body.

The exhibition dedicated to the German-born photojournalist, featuring a selection from his archive—now safeguarded by the Fundación Televisa—focuses on documenting the transformation and growth of Mexico City in the mid-20th century, highlighting its social and urban contrasts.

The CAAM opens its new season with an exhibition showcasing five recent acquisitions, highlighting works by Carlos Garaicoa and Karlo Andrei Ibarra that explore memory, space, and transformation.

Lugar de estar: o legado Burle Marx (A Place to Be: The Legacy of Burle Marx) is the exhibition presented by Lisbon’s MAC/CCB – Museum of Contemporary Art and Architecture Center, showcasing an extensive selection of landscape projects for public spaces developed by Roberto Burle Marx (São Paulo, Brazil, 1909 – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1994) and his collaborators over nearly seventy years.

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.

Contemporary Art Now in Madrid focuses on contemporary painting and highlights the value of Latin American art through the FOCO LATAM program. The proposals by regional artists presented at the fair reveal a diverse panorama, featuring material explorations, cultural memory, and contemporary imaginaries.

We propose an overview of Latin American art presented at ARCO through ten proposals that illustrate and outline current tendencies, where critical and experimental perspectives, nature, materiality and organic processes shape different languages through which to address key themes.

We explored the visions and practices of eleven Latin American galleries to gauge the pulse of the region’s art and its status at ARCO, with proposals that, without ignoring the commercial side, affirm tradition, experimentation, and diversity of languages as a common hallmark.

The curated program at ARCOmadrid once again provides a prominent space for Latin American galleries and artists at the fair. With José Esparza Chong Cuy leading the new edition, the program exudes a diversity of approaches and realities, raising questions while simultaneously serving as a key opportunity for visibility.

The curators present in their program at ARCOmadrid 2026 the exploration of the future as an open question. From theatrical play, where the dialogue between works and artists raises doubt and critique without certainties, the curators invite to “keep the eyes open” regarding what is to come.

Spain applies a 21% VAT to gallery sales of artworks, a rate in place since 2012. In contrast, other cultural sectors benefit from reduced rates: cinema, theatre and concerts are taxed at 10%, and books at 4%. Contemporary art galleries, however, remain subject to the general rate.

Valeria Maculan presents an installation that turns the exhibition space into a stage shared with the audience. The work uses large, foldable textile figures to create a theatrical environment that evokes archetypes, myth, and ritual.

From the curatorship of the Foco LATAM program at CAN Art Fair Madrid, Christian Viveros-Fauné approaches surrealism as a tool for reading global uncertainty, while advocating for painting and Latin American artistic practices as spaces of resistance and the creation of new imaginaries.

The program will select one artist residing to take part in a six-month residency at one of Europe’s leading contemporary art institutions. Application deadline: March 1, 2026.

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.

Spanish art galleries are protesting with a temporary closure against a tax policy that places them at a competitive disadvantage compared to their European counterparts. The sector is calling for the application of a reduced VAT rate to ensure commercial competitiveness and to continue strengthening and reinvesting in the cultural ecosystem.

The three artists will bring their unique Latin American perspectives to reflect on the global themes addressed by the cycle: feminism, historical memory and power relations.

La Tercera Nave brings together the practices of Linarejos Moreno and Vanessa Enríquez in a dialogue centered on the material and symbolic remnants of memory. Through the concepts of textiles and weaving, both artists address fragmentation from industrial and technological perspectives.

Let’s Play. Juguemos en la colección, a BIENALSUR project, engages with the permanent collection of the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas through the conceptual lens of play, featuring the work of ten artists, mostly from Latin America, including Marta Minujín, Glenda León, and Silvia Rivas.

The installation is constructed using the artist's usual practices, where sand, pigments, and translucent curtains come together with cosmology and contemporary languages.

Andrea Canepa intervenes in the Palacio de Cristal at the Museo Reina Sofía with Fardo, an installation consisting of a large tarp inspired by pre-Columbian funerary bundles that transforms the building into a symbolic body, inviting reflection on what is visible and displayed, as well as on preservation and transformation.

The exhibition brings together a decade of technical and poetic experimentation that transcends the traditional boundaries of photography and places visual experience at the center of reflection. 

The exhibition traces different moments and formal strategies in her practice, marked by a critical reflection on violence, denial, and the tensions that permeate the female experience in contemporary society.

By Mónica Sotos

What are the successive diasporas of Latin American artists to Spain about, from the final years prior to the turn of the twenty-first century to the present? Article 2 of a series of 3.

The Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía (C3A) in Córdoba is presenting Me duelen los ojos de mirar sin verte, the first solo exhibition in Spain by Ana Segovia (Mexico City, Mexico, 1991), on view until January. Curated by Jimena Blázquez Abascal, the show features thirteen oil paintings on canvas and one work on wood, all created expressly for the occasion.