One more year, Art Madrid reinforces its position as one of the most outstanding contemporary art fairs in the Art Week, closing its fourteenth edition with a very positive results: more than 20,000 people visited the fair and the vast majority of the participating gallery directors claim that they are very satisfied with the sales balance made during the five days celebration.

This edition, the fair has once again surpassed the numbers of visitors being, in the general public’s opinion, one of the most welcoming, close and pleasant fairs in its route. Furthermore, this edition has achieved excellent impressions on behalf of the professional sector, outlining this year for having a greater role in national and international media. Secondly, the Activities Program also stood out for receiving great acceptance from the general audience and an excellent review from the professional sector. This year the program was dedicated to video art, it was curated by Mario Gutiérrez Cru, director of the Proyector Video Art Festival and held at CaixaForum Madrid and Sala Alcalá 31.

Photo: Diana Fernández.

In general, the media has highlighted the new and more qualitative selection criteria of both the Committee and gallerists, presenting strictly contemporary selections and leaving behind the so-called "secondary market". Furthermore, in this edition, all current artistic disciplines have been accommodated, from painting, sculpture, photography, video art to the more hybrid disciplines also including living arts such as performance. The most outstanding reviews have been associated, on the one hand, with the new One Project program, curated by Nerea Ubieto; and on the other hand, with the “Copying Claudia” performance by the artist Pachi Santiago (Zielinsky Gallery). Undoubtedly, critics have also especially celebrated the new media installation within the series “Repúblicas Mínimas” by the Guest Artist, Rubén Martín de Lucas.

Photo: Paola Aloise.

As the critic and curator Alfonso de la Torre, member of the Art Madrid Committee, explains, the fair "has come of age", highlighting "the quality of the galleries selection" that this year have been exhibited "with greater clarification of the space, which has allowed a better reading and appreciation of the works".

The fair has generated a high volume of sales and the vast majority of gallerists are very satisfied with the sales balance made. In general, the increase in the presence of private and institutional collectors is worth pointing out, from local and regional entities to international entities. Professionals from the Public sector visits also stand out; in charge of cultural institutions, museums or art centres such as the Ministry of Culture, MUSAC, IVAM, MARCO, ARTIUM, CA2M, CEART or the Picasso Museum; specialists and academics from national universities such as the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid or the Universidad de Nebrija; as well as representatives of private collections such as Iberdrola, Repsol, Iberia, Mercedes-Benz and Inelcom have toured the art show.

Photo: Melisa Medina.

National exhibitors such as Víctor Lope Arte Contemporáneo (Barcelona), Bea Villamarín (Gijón), Moret Art (A Coruña), Marita Segovia (Madrid), Miquel Alzueta (Barcelona), Aurora Vigil-Escalera (Gijón), Zielinsky (Barcelona), Hispánica Contemporánea (Madrid-Mexico City), 3 Punts (Barcelona), BAT Alberto Cornejo (Madrid), DDR Art Gallery (Madrid) or About Art (Lugo), togheter with foreign exhibitors such as Paulo Nunes-Arte Contemporânea (Vila Franca de Xira, Portugal), Schmalfuss (Berlin) or Yiri Arts (Taipei, Taiwan), made a positive balance.

Photo. Ione Adán.

On the one hand, one of the gallerists especially satisfied was Víctor Lope (Barcelona), whose selection integrated by the works of Patrik Grijalvo, Kepa Garraza, Jacinto Moros and Dirk Salz, together with the solo show of Alejandra Atarés in the One Project program, have been acquired both by private collectors and by collectors of large foundations. In addition, the gallery owner Víctor Lope is grateful to have been highlighted and awarded as one of the two best booths of this edition. On the other hand, the Taiwanese Yiri Arts gallery, directed by Orton Huang, has been participating in Art Madrid for years. The director comments that "our artists are already and much better known by the wider audience; this edition we decided to create a more intense dialogue between the Taiwanese and the Spanish artists, including multiple connections between them: two women (Chen Yun and Mònica Subidé) and two men (Guim Tió and Lai Wei-Yu)". Also, the gallerist commented, “Guim Tió’s works were the most sellers”, as well as the gallery team expressed their delight at the new edition of Art Madrid.

Photo: Ione Adán. Work in the image by Pepa Salas.

David Delgado Ruiz, director of the online gallery DDR Art Gallery, one of the first-time participating galleries within the One Project program, recognizes that, although there are some deals to be completed in the coming days, the balance is good and he noted that the work by Virginia Rivas was very well received: "the reception has been excellent, as much on the part of the specialized critic and the collectors, as on the part of the general public".

Photo. Ione Adán. Work in the image by François Bel.

Art Madrid, in addition to showing a unique showcase of contemporary creation and promoting the contemporary art collecting, is a space in which artists, gallerists, curators, critics and other cultural agents create new relationships, propose future collaborations or commission upcoming works. And, although the show has concluded, the work of Art Madrid team continues the rest of the year in its digital version, through communication and the online art shopping platform: Art Madrid Market.

Thank you very much for being part of one of the most successful editions of Art Madrid!

Thirteen years have passed since its beginnings, and in all this time the Video Art Festival PROYECTOR has grown and consolidated its position as an essential event in this discipline. Since its inception, the initiative has tried to give visibility to a discipline that has always been relegated to the background in the usual exhibition circuits. Although video creation is not new, since it emerged by its own in the 60s of last century, the way to get to know it and enjoy it has not always been easy. On many occasions, the exhibitions only included a few isolated pieces within the main route, as if the video was the anecdotal contribution to the whole. However, our daily lives are invaded by moving images, and there is a paradox that video art, despite being a format of artistic expression very much in tune with the habits of today's society, remains a minority discipline

Frame from “Hel City”, by Gregorio Méndez Sáez, 2019

To some extent, PROYECTOR was born to reverse this situation, to value video as a creative format and to offer a wide, itinerant space to host a multitude of proposals, coming from inside and outside our borders. In this time, the growth of the festival has led it to travel the world, but also, to be a benchmark that each year arouses more interest. In the open call to receive proposals, they reach almost half a thousand, and a hundred works selected by the jury are a representative sample of different ways of understanding video creation, with pieces mainly from Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

In turn, PROYECTOR wants to be more than a video showcase and offers a large program with talks, workshops, masterclasses, meetings with artists, visits and concerts. A complete experience that always has the moving image as a backdrop.

El Instante Francisco Ruiz de Infante. El bosque que se mueve (errores de medida)

In this evolution, another circumstance stands out: video is a creative format that has its own codes, but it is also one of the disciplines most open to artistic hybridization and the widening of uses. The video may, therefore, be the genuine idea of an author who conceives an autonomous project to be carried out in this format, but it can also be the complementary result of an action or the documentary record of a previous performance being recorded to guarantee its survival. The versatility of the moving image and the potential that it has acquired in recent years allows us today to speak of numerous branches of art that focus on the fusion of languages and the integration of techniques and methodologies from other sectors, and in many of them, the video is still a cornerstone. So it is with technological art, interactive sound art, performance recording, the transformation from big data to image, artificial intelligence, and a long etcetera. Precisely for this reason, PROYECTOR offers a panoramic vision of this reality, with an extremely interesting program that plays with the variety and wealth of proposals.

Frame from “Herdança”, by Thiago Rocha Pitta, 2007

The 2020 edition will run from September 9th to 20th. As usual, the program displays in various venues throughout the city of Madrid, each of which will house a small section of the activities. This year the festival will count with the collaboration of the Casa Árabe, White Lab, Cruce, El Instante Fundación, ¡ésta es una PLAZA!, Extensión AVAM (Matadero Madrid), Institut Français de Madrid, Medialab Prado, Quinta del Sordo, Sala Alcalá 31, Sala El Águila, Secuencia de Inútiles and White Lab, in addition to the collaboration of the INELCOM Collection and the video art collection of Teresa Sapey.

The festival is also the ideal place to articulate the cultural fabric, since it involves numerous professionals in the sector, from curators to creators, from centres managers to critics and teachers. The 2020 program also has the collaboration of the FUSO Festival and the Museo Reina Sofía, which are providing some of their pieces for the exhibition.

In short, an appointment that lovers of contemporary art should not miss and that promises many novelties in this 13th edition.