Notes related to Spain

On Friday, January 21, at 6:30 p.m., the individual exhibition TRAMA, by Nela Ochoa, a Venezuelan/Spanish artist who has resided in Tenerife since 2017, will open at the Saro León gallery.

ARCOmadrid returns to its usual date to celebrate its 40 (+1) Anniversary, from February 23rd to 27th. A unique project set to bring past and present together through the galleries and their essential relationship with artists and collectors. 

The project, curated by Imma Prieto, structures and defines the Collection from a line of research focused on the human body, understood as a reflection of socio-political situations in different contexts. In addition, it brings us closer to the construction of identity from the relationship between body, subject and image. The exhibition can be visited in Space C of the Museum until November 13, 2022.

Colografias, the first European retrospective in honor of the Cuban engraver Belkis Ayón (Havana, 1967-1999) was inaugurated on November 16th at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid. The exhibition, which brings together around 80 works produced between 1986 and 1999, constitutes Km 10048 of the International Biennial of Contemporary Art of the South (BIENALSUR), since it is a part, as an associated exhibition, of the biennial held in 124 venues around the world.

Within the Panorama institutional program, this exhibition focuses on aesthetics and artistic practices in and around Barcelona. It comprises a wide range of disciplines, including painting, sculpture, works on paper, video installation, performance, photography and textiles, and is driven by a desire to defend and verify the making of on-site exhibitions as experiences that envelop us as whole sensing bodies in space. As the “notes” of the title suggests, this group exhibition attempts to jot down, to lay out and to connect without seeking to be in any way definitive.

Es Baluard Museu d'Art Contemporani de Palma exhibits “The Archive of Dust: An Ongoing Project”, an exhaustive overview of the fundamental lines that characterize Elena del Rivero’s (Valencia, 1949) work gravitating around the attacks of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, in New York. The project deals with loss, the collective memory and pain, as well as with the construction of the existential pillars that make up the beliefs and values ​​of society to rethink the future.

Galería Zielinsky presents Yamandú Canosa's exhibition "Entre ramas” (Between Branches) as an epilogue — a coda — to "El árbol de los frutos diferentes", the project that the artist presented in 2011 at the Fundació Suñol in Barcelona. “Entre ramas” is Yamandú Canosa's first solo exhibition for the Zielinsky Gallery, in which the artist revisits works from different periods that interweave different formal preferences and thematic subjects.

BIENALSUR 2021 arrives at the Francis Naranjo Foundation, in the Canary Islands, Spain with A New Order. Breaking Down Borders, an exhibition curated by Diana Wechsler, artistic director of the contemporary art biennial that celebrates its third edition in more than 23 countries, 50 cities and 124 venues in five continents. The exhibition, which can be seen until the end of September, is part of the curatorial axes Política del arte / Constelaciones fluididas (Art Politics / Fluid Constellations), in line with the exhibition Al Sur del Sur, which is on display in Malaga and Juntos Aparte, at the National Museum of Colombia in Bogota.

OpenFile - video cycle where artists describe their works and elaborate on their artistic processes. In this edition, the Cuban artist describes her work with art, nature, and metaphors.

In its third edition, BIENALSUR, icon of the resistance and resilience of art in times of pandemic, travels to La Térmica as the first venue in Spain in 2021. The project shows invisibilized realities through the work of Latin American artists Voluspa Jarpa, Agustina Woodgate, Graciela Sacco, and Paola Monzillo

The Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (IVAM) exhibits works by the British artist of Palestinian origin after she was awarded the Julio González Prize 2020 by the Generalitat Valenciana. The show gathers together a selection of sculptures, large-scale installations and works on paper created mostly in the last two decades. It is intended to serve as a tribute to an artistic oeuvre of great diversity and significance, presenting key works that have become iconic pieces of the contemporary art world.

A conscious capture, which thinks of itself, and freezes in order to account for temporal movement.

The General Council of the MACBA Consortium has appointed her as the new director, valuing her contribution of “an innovative look at the role of the museum on the local and international scene, also incorporating a clear desire to connect with contemporary debates on the role of art in this beginning of the century, without avoiding a clear commitment to the social problems that surround cultural institutions”.

Three recent works by Cecilia Bengolea (b. 1979, Buenos Aires) are featured. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice merges video, choreography, and sculpture. Following the thread of water and movement flows, this exhibition presents a selection of works where the artist’s reflection on dance, the sensorial interplay between the body’s interiority and its surroundings, as well as the rhythmical relations of social communities and nature, symptomatically manifest through the choreographic language.

Conceived as an exhibition project in progress, with an essential educational aspect, the exhibition A recent art history (1960-2020), brings together two complementary and consecutive art collections - that of the Juan March Foundation and that of DKV Seguros - in the two museums of the Juan March Foundation, the Cuenca Museum of Abstract Art and the Juan March Foundation Museum in Palma.

Reactivating the market, promoting art sales and bringing about a reunion between contemporary art professionals have been the objectives that have driven the organization of this edition of ARCOmadrid 2021. These objectives have centered IFEMA MADRID's commitment to reanimate this essential event for boosting the art business, attracting great collectors from all over the world and discussing the immediate future of art. All of which lies on the essential axes of this edition: quality of the contents, internationality and presence of collectors.

Overcoming the distances and obstacles created by the global crisis, Latin American art continues to stand strong. With a specially designed section -REMITENTE-, created in collaboration with Mariano Mayer, ARCO is witness of a strong latin protagonism.

The 36-year-old Peruvian artist presented 'Papapatriarchy', an irony to the representation of the patriarchal figure that constitutes a reflection on the personal experiences of hers and many other women.

Her work De dos cuerpos vengo (From two bodies I come) has been chosen by an international jury of experts among the five finalist proposals that are exhibited these days at ARCOmadrid 2021. Antonio Fernández Alvira, Fernando García, Juan López and Belén Rodríguez, have been the other four creators who have been part of the fifth edition of this award

As a novelty this year, the presence of Latin America takes a different role and adjusted to reality. ARCOmadrid incorporates the REMITENTE. Latin American Art section, produced with the complicity of Mariano Mayer. The proposal shows the importance of Latin American art at the Fair and its essence is to facilitate and support the galleries that this time cannot travel to Madrid.

As a novelty this year, the presence of Latin America takes a different role and adjusted to reality. ARCOmadrid incorporates the section REMITENTE. Latin American Art, produced with the complicity of Mariano Mayer. The proposal shows the importance of Latin American art in the Fair and its essence is to facilitate and support the galleries that this time cannot travel to Madrid.

The Maria and Armando Cabral Collection, the Eulogio Sánchez Collection and the "la Caixa" Foundation Contemporary Art Collection have been awarded on this occasion for their artistic value and work in supporting the dissemination of contemporary art.

Within the ambitious Collection reorganization that the Reina Sofía Museum is carrying out, the nucleus Los enemigos de la poesía: Resistencias en América Latina (The enemies of poetry: Resistances in Latin America) is presented, focused on Latin art produced between 1964 and 1987 and its relationship with Spain. The political transformations of the time and the appearance of new artistic practices, such as mail art, favored a series of transcendental exchanges for the future of contemporary art.

Exhibited at Galería Zielinsky, this solo exhibition will take place until September 10, 2021 in Barcelona. It gives an account of the recent production of the artist, who bases his research on envisioning a new perspective of the landscape: extracting the layers of the environment he inhabits and discovering the synergies that arise between fragments of everyday ruins with materials of great symbolic charge.

Organized by the Museo Reina Sofía and curated by Manuel Borja-Villel, the exhibition proposes a scheme where each canvas maintains its own autonomy as a work of art, but also remains in close connection with the rest of the pieces, in a kind of evocative ecosystem of climatic, sensory and emotional experiences. In this sense, Suter's canvases hang, without a frame, in installations that seek an immediate relationship with the architectural and natural space, while inevitably referring to the environment in which they were created.

The exhibition aims to explore the influence of Iberian art in Pablo Picasso’s oeuvre through more tan 200 pieces. Organised with the Musée national Picasso-Paris and curated by Cécile Godefroy and Roberto Ontañón Peredo, this stimulating, original exhibition invites visitors to reflect on how the discovery of a native, “primitive”, art shaped the artistic language and identity of one of the greatest artists in the twentieth century.

The fair will take place from July 7 to 11 with a special highlight on new protagonists. In addition to the General Program and the Opening Program, ARCO incorporates REMITENTE, a special Latin American art section and concentrates Artist Projects exclusively on women. In total, the fair will host 131 galleries, of which 54% are not Spanish.

Guest Curator Elvira Dyangani Ose, Director of The Showroom (London), presents the project ‘Contra la raza’ [Against Race] at Matadero Madrid within the framework of PHotoESPAÑA 2021. This multidisciplinary initiative incorporates a video-based installation and live programme focusing on futuristic imaginaries expressed through poetics of the Black experience that generate new forms of global and egalitarian humanism.

La Casa Encendida (Madrid) and Wellcome Collection (London) present Un Encuentro Vegetal  (A Vegetal Encounter), an exhibition that explores our symbiotic relationship with plants as shown through the work of Patricia Domínguez (1984, Santiago de Chile), Ingela Ihrman (1985, Kalmar, Sweden) and Eduardo Navarro (1979, Buenos Aires). Conceived as a dialogue, it shows the Works of these three artists as they deconstruct the omnipresent artificial wall there is between human beings and nature, the wall that is devastating our ecosystems, our life and our health. Curated by  Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz.

The Rafael Tous Collection, donated to MACBA (Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona) just one year ago, is the portrait of a moment and specific artistic practices. A passionate collector linked to the textile world, Rafael Tous opted for conceptual art as a set of plural practices that prioritized the idea and the process over the object. Without speculative intention and in an intuitive way, Tous set up a collection that brings together the attitudes and experimental works of a group of artists with whom, in many cases, he established bonds of friendship, in addition to accompanying them in their artistic growth. Exhibition curated by: Antònia Maria Perelló, curator and head of the MACBA Collection, and Claudia Segura, curator of exhibitions and Collection.