Trained in Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country, the Bradford Art College in England and the University of Barcelona, ​​Kepa Garraza (Berango, Vizcaya, 1979) began his exhibition career in 2004. From that time, he received various scholarships and awards.

Kepa Garraza's work reflects on the nature of the images we consume daily. For this reason, his work questions official discourses and calls into question the processes of institutional legitimation. The proposed reflection drinks from his interest in the construction processes of the historical narrative. In this way, Kepa invites the viewer to question the information obtained from the official media. His reinterpretation of reality is always ambiguous and confusing, full of subtleties and grey areas that invite the viewer to rethink the historical account and the chronicle of reality.

Kepa Garraza

Interview:

What inspires you when creating?

Mainly I am inspired by current events of the reality in which we live. Basically, our daily life. The detailed observation of the facts and circumstances that most influence us in our daily lives. Above all, I am interested in reflecting on them and elaborating a rereading of reality.

What are you working on recently?

I am now working on a series of quite different works because the creation process has an essential digital component—something new in my creative process. Being concise and concrete, it is about creating elements of public sculpture (monuments) that do not exist from scratch and making a kind of assemblage in which I substitute monuments of diligent politicians, monarchs and revolutionaries from all over the world for these pieces of fiction, for these drills.

Kepa Garraza

Charlemagne, 2017

Pastel sobre papel

140 x 100cm

Tell us about your creative process.

My creative process is quite orderly, and I think it's a true reflection of myself. I imagine, like everyone else, it is always based on (or begins) with the concretion of an idea that is generated and matures little by little inside the head. Gradually it takes shape until it becomes something definite. Until I have that reasonably clear idea in my head, even with a very concrete image of the final works, I don't start the creation process per se. It is a very detailed process where the following phases are very established, and I rarely skip them. I have been working like this for many years, and I imagine it is a matter of economy of effort and comfort.

Are you participating for the first time in the fair? What do you expect from Art Madrid?

I have participated in the fair before. The truth is that it has always had a very positive result for me. With which, I hope that this year the result will be repeated and it will be a great fair if the health situation allows it.

Kepa Garraza

Calígula, 2021

Carbón comprimido sobre papel

100 x 75cm

Tell us about Kepa Garraza, the imaginary artist, your alter ego born in 1957.

Kepa Garraza of fiction is an alter ego born very close to my father's dates. He is a Kepa who becomes an excellent star in the art world, being quite young, in the early '80s, and ends up having a meteoric career that makes him a superstar. The life of this Kepa Garraza is narrated in a series of paintings that function as a kind of fictional biography where he is seen accompanied by illustrious personalities of the last 40 years, but none of his works are ever seen.

Is art for you a tool to criticize the art system itself?

Yes, in a way, but not only the art system but the entire sociopolitical reality. Bearing in mind that art is still a very faithful reflection of the world we live in, all my work has a component of social criticism. Or well, you want to invite thinking about certain concepts related to the economy, politics, history and social reorganization. Art, of course, falls within that objective.

It is true that perhaps a few years ago, my language and my works spoke more of the world of art, and now I deal with more general topics. But in the background, all the series and those interests are interrelated. They all arise from my obsessions and things that interest me.

Kepa Garraza

Isabel II, 2021

Carbón comprimido sobre papel

100 x 75cm

Kepa Garraza participa en Art Madrid con la galería de Barcelona Víctor Lope Arte Contemporáneo, junto a los artistas: Carsten Beck, Dirk Salz, Jacinto Moros, Jo Hummuel, Mario Dilitz, Max Gärtner y Patrick Grijalvo.

Daniel Barrio. Guest artist of the third edition of OPEN BOOTH. Courtesy of the artist.

DESPIECE. PROTOCOLO DE MUTACIÓN

As part of the Art Madrid’26 Parallel Program, we present the third edition of Open Booth, a space conceived as a platform for artistic creation and contemporary experimentation. The initiative focuses on artists who do not yet have representation within the gallery circuit, offering a high-visibility professional context in which new voices can develop their practice, explore forms of engagement with audiences, and consolidate their presence within the current art scene. On this occasion, the project features artist Daniel Barrio (Cuba, 1988), who presents the site-specific work Despiece. Protocolo de mutación.

Daniel Barrio’s practice focuses on painting as a space for experimentation, from which he explores the commodification of social life and the tyranny of media approval. He works with images drawn from the press and other media, intervening in them pictorially to disrupt their original meaning. Through this process, the artist opens up new readings and questions how meaning is produced, approaching painting as a space of realization, therapy, and catharsis.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación is built from urban remnants, industrial materials, and fragments of history, inviting us to reflect on which memories we inherit, which we consume, and which ones we are capable of creating. Floors, walls, and volumes come together to form a landscape under tension, where the sacred coexists with the everyday, and where cracks matter more than perfection.

The constant evolution of art calls for ongoing exchange between artists, institutions, and audiences. In its 21st edition, Art Madrid reaffirms its commitment to acting as a catalyst for this dialogue, expanding the traditional boundaries of the art fair context and opening up new possibilities of visibility for emerging practices.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación emerges from a critical and affective impulse to dismantle, examine, and reassemble what shapes us culturally and personally. The work is conceived as an inseparable whole: an inner landscape that operates as a device of suspicion, where floors, walls, and volumes configure an ecosystem of remnants. It proposes a reading of history not as a linear continuity, but as a system of forces in permanent friction, articulating space as an altered archive—a surface that presents itself as definitive while remaining in constant transformation.

The work takes shape as a landscape constructed from urban waste, where floors, walls, and objects form a unified body made of lime mortar, PVC from theatrical signage, industrial foam, and offering wax. At the core of the project is an L-shaped structure measuring 5 × 3 meters, which reinterprets the fresco technique on reclaimed industrial supports. The mortar is applied wet over continuous working days, without a pursuit of perfection, allowing the material to reveal its own character. Orbiting this structure are architectural fragments: foam blocks that simulate concrete, a 3D-printed and distorted Belvedere torso, and a wax sculptural element embedded with sandpaper used by anonymous workers and artists, preserving the labor of those other bodies.

A white wax sculptural element functions within the installation as a point of sensory concentration that challenges the gaze. Inside it converge the accumulated faith of offering candles and the industrial residues of the studio, recalling that purity and devotion coexist with the materiality of everyday life. The viewer’s experience thus moves beyond the visual: bending down, smelling, and approaching its vulnerability transforms perception into an intimate, embodied act. Embedded within its density are sanding blocks used by artists, artisans, and laborers, recovered from other contexts, where the sandpaper operates as a trace of the effort of other bodies, following a protocol of registration with no autobiographical intent.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación addresses us directly, asking: which memory do we value—the one we consume, or the one we construct with rigor? The audience leaves behind a purely contemplative position to become part of the system, as the effort of moving matter, documentary rigor, and immersive materiality form a body of resistance against a mediated reality. The project thus takes shape as an inner landscape, where floor, surface, and volume articulate an anatomy of residues. Adulteration operates as an analytical methodology applied to the layers of urban reality, intervening in history through theatrical and street advertising, architectural remnants, and administrative protocols, proposing that art can restore the capacity to build one’s own memory, even if inevitably fragmented.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

DANIEL BARRIO (1988, Cuba)

Daniel Barrio (Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1988) is a visual artist whose practice articulates space through painting, understanding the environment as an altered archive open to critical intervention. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Cienfuegos (2004–2008), specializing in painting, and later at the Madrid Film School (ECAM, 2012–2015), where he studied Art Direction. His methodology integrates visual thinking with scenographic narrative.

His trajectory includes solo exhibitions such as La levedad en lo cotidiano (Galería María Porto, Madrid, 2023), Interiores ajenos (PlusArtis, Madrid, 2022), and Tribud (Navel Art, Madrid, 2019), as well as significant group exhibitions including Space is the Landscape (Estudio Show, Madrid, 2024), Winterlinch (Espacio Valverde Gallery, Madrid, 2024), Hiberia (Galería María Porto, Lisbon, 2023), and the traveling exhibition of the La Rioja Young Art Exhibition (2022).

A member of the Resiliencia Collective, his work does not pursue the production of objects but rather the articulation of pictorial devices that generate protocols of resistance against the flow of disposable images. In a context saturated with immediate data, his practice produces traces and archives what must endure, questioning not the meaning of the work itself but the memory the viewer constructs through interaction—thus reclaiming sovereignty over the gaze and inhabiting ruins as a method for understanding the present.