We continue our summer agenda for art-contact being another way of recharging batteries. Summer is the ideal time to enjoy culture and art in a more relaxed way, outside the rush of the rest of the year.

MADRID

The Gaviria Palace hosts until September 15th an extraordinary exhibition dedicated to Liu Bolin under the title "The invisible man". This Shandong-born creator started his career in the world of sculpture but soon began to explore the power of photography, performance and installation to channel his artistic concerns. The title of the exhibition refers to the work the author has developed around the mimicry and the gimmicky works in which he seems to merge with the environment. The result is a large format photograph that deceives our senses and forces us to look twice to understand what we are really seeing. Within this line, his series "Migrants" involves other people on the scene and merges them with the beaches and boats that constitute their harsh reality, what proposes a double game between metaphorical invisibility and the real invisibility of this type of human conflicts.

Liu Bolin, "Green food"

GIJÓN

LABoral Center for Art and Industrial Creation presents “Eco-visionarios”, a contemporary creation project carried out in collaboration with other institutions: Bildmuseet of Umeå (Sweden), House of Electronic Arts (HeK) of Basel (Switzerland), MAAT- Museum of Art and Architecture of Lisbon (Portugal), to which Matadero Madrid and the Royal Academy of Arts in London have recently joined. The objective of this initiative, which has already been running for two years, is to analyse from an artistic perspective the environmental challenges that appear the society of our time, taking as a starting point the principles that underlie the activity of each of the institutions involved. Thus, after addressing the issue giving priority to approaches such as the relationship between art and ecology, the emergence of sustainable architecture, or the link between art and technology; LABoral delves into the biosphere-technosphere connection, with transversal works that interrelate art, science, technology and society. To the Gijón program, the activities of the Nave16 of Matadero Madrid add.

BILBAO

The Guggenheim Bilbao welcomes the work of Jenny Holzer under the title "Lo indescriptible." This American author began her career in painting but soon perceived that this medium was insufficient for her artistic purposes. She became then interested in public art and writing. Because language contains the enormous power to transform, to understand multiple messages, to host numerous philosophical and political positions. In the new millennium, Holzer went from the use of others’ texts to her own literary production. The visual and aesthetic game between content and container is constant in her work. The media gets diverse, and the power of speech enhances. Throughout her career, she has resorted to everyday materials with projects that interact directly with the public (messages on posters, wrappers, products ...) and also to more durable works, with headlines and lines engraved in stone, lighted signs and a long etcetera. This exhibition presents an extensive tour of her work, to understand the scope of her messages and participate in the same critical discourse.

Jenny Holzer, "For Bilbao"

MÁLAGA

After the enormous success reaped by this exhibition in Madrid, “An unauthorised exhibition” arrives at La Térmica. It is a selection of works by the controversial Banksy contributed by private collectors. Surrounded still by mystery and anonymity, this urban artist has earned the recognition of critics and the public with transgressive works of a witty message that always pose an open criticism of the established system. Every proposal is a question that challenges the viewer, to rethink the schemes inherited from our society and our capitalist market.

PALMA DE MALLORCA

Plessi's universe takes over Es Baluards this summer. Fabrizio Plessi, an artist who arrived in Palma in 1989 to stay, made the island his place of work, where he took root and built a net of interwoven relationships with his work and his fascination for new disciplines. Captivated by video art since its inception, his passage through Palma on the cusp of his career was a creative impulse of great depth. He mixed the baroque inherited from Italy with spiritualised minimalism that gave him the serenity of the place. His work continually resorts to some fundamental themes, which face life from a humanistic perspective. Essential issues such as time and space, light and object, awareness of sustainability, the vision of the Mediterranean as a cultural link... The exhibition includes a large part of his author books and videos related to their stories, to generate a multisensory visitor experience. Until September 1st.

Fabrizio Plessi, Digital Wall (Acqua 6), 2018

BURGOS

The CAB of Burgos holds two interesting samples with a clear sensory vocation. We start with "PERturbacións", by Christian Villamide (Lugo, 1966). With pieces of painting, sculpture and photography, this project is about the detachment that human beings currently live concerning their natural environment. The spaces previously occupied by natural ecosystems are buried by urban progress. The distance created with respect to a context that should be the closest and most organic gives rise to progressive mechanisation of interactions, a division of spaces, with human interventions that are often forgotten over time.

Kitazu&Gomez, "Anchovy Freak", 2007-2015

On the other hand, we highlight the exhibition ‘Haggish Flash’, of the group formed by Jesús Gómez (Burgos, 1962) and Megumi Kitazu (Tokushima, 1975). Both artists met in Berlin in 2001, and since then they have shared lines of work upon aspects of contemporary everyday life based on their personal experiences. Using a fictitious ice cream brand as a pretext, Kitazu & Gomez address issues such as sexual identity, multiculturalism, the relationship between marketing and art... The collection brings together paintings and installations where they use materials of all kinds and incorporate digital techniques.

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.