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!

ABIERTO INFINITO. LO QUE EL CUERPO RECUERDA. CICLO DE PERFORMANCE X ART MADRID'26

Art Madrid, committed to creating a discursive platform for artists working within the field of performance and action art, presents Abierto Infinito: lo que el cuerpo recuerda, a proposal inspired by Erving Goffman’s ideas in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Amorrortu Editores, Buenos Aires, 1997).

The project unfolds within a theoretical framework that directly engages with these premises, conceiving social interaction as a stage of carefully modulated performances designed to influence others’ perceptions. Goffman argues that individuals deploy both verbal and involuntary expressions to guide the interpretation of their behavior, sustaining roles and façades that define the situation for those who observe.

The body — the first territory of all representation — precedes both word and learned gesture. Human experience, conscious and unconscious alike, is inscribed within it. Abierto Infinito: lo que el cuerpo recuerda departs from this premise: representation inhabits existence itself, and life, understood as a succession of representations, transforms the body into a space of constant negotiation over who we are. In this passage, boundaries blur; the individual opens toward the collective, and the ephemeral acquires symbolic dimension. By inhabiting this interstice, performance simultaneously reveals the fragility of identity and the strength that emerges from encounter with others.

PERFORMANCE: TRAYECTORIA. BY AMANDA GATTI

March 6 | 7:00 PM. Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles.

Amanda Gatti. Escaparate. 2023. DT-Espacio. Photograph by Pedro Mendes.

The proposal expands Amanda Gatti’s research initiated in La Plasti Ciudad del Cuerpo — an ongoing series of performance and installation presented since 2023 in spaces such as Fundación Antonio Pérez, Galería Nueva, CRUCE, and the Acción Spring(t)/UCM Congress — where she explores the relationship between her body and objects found in urban space. There, body and materials are articulated through a constant negotiation between functionality, weight, and support, generating temporary architectural compositions.

In Trayectoria, this research shifts toward the act of dragging: a gesture that makes visible the friction between body, objects, and space. The corridor ceases to be a neutrality to be crossed and becomes an operative intermediate zone, where form and content — veil and what is veiled, as Walter Benjamin points out — become confused. The space, saturated with objects turned into a mobile chain, clears and remakes itself with each step. Clearing, for Benjamin, is already an experience of space: each advance sustains this unfinished separation, always oriented toward a destination that may never be reached.

La Plasti Ciudad del Cuerpo #3. Amanda Gatti. Performance documentation. CRUCE 2054 exhibition, Galería CRUCE. Photograph by Pedro Mendes.

Displacement is not limited to material friction: it also becomes a symbolic inscription of that which every life trajectory drags along. The objects — remnants of past uses — function as metaphors for what remains attached to the body even when it no longer serves any function. The performance makes visible the condition of moving forward while carrying heterogeneous weights: material, affective, social. Thus, the gesture of walking linked to these objects turns the route into a writing in motion, where each step simultaneously activates a physical transit and a vital transit. Trayectoria proposes that every life is also a dragging: a continuous recomposing from what we insist on carrying with us.

The action operates objects as verbs: to push, to tense, to trip, to pull. From it emerges an operativity that involves the entire body and exceeds the visual. The image ceases to be representation and becomes gesture: a gesture that founds new spatial forms, that overflows, that produces an ephemeral mode of reappropriation of the corridor.

The trajectory thus becomes an affective map inscribed in the body, a way of merging with the environment by putting past and future, durability and wear, utility and obsolescence into friction. The action returns to public space what was taken from it, but now stripped of function: freed from meaning, freed from commodification, freed to be imagined otherwise.

ABOUT AMANDA GATTI

Amanda Gatti (1996, Porto Alegre, Brazil) is an artist and researcher whose practice unfolds across performance, video, photography, and installation. She explores the intersections of body, object, and space, investigating how we occupy — and are occupied by — the spaces around us. Drawing from experiences of displacement and the observation of domestic and urban environments, her work conceives the body as mediator and archive, transforming found objects, spatial arrangements, and everyday gestures into ephemeral architectures and relational situations.

She studied the Master’s in Scenic Practice and Visual Culture at Museo Reina Sofía/UCLM (Spain, 2023) and the Bachelor’s degree in Audiovisual Production at PUCRS (Brazil, 2018), where she received scholarships such as the Santander Universities grant. In Spain, her work has been presented in institutions and contexts such as Museo Reina Sofía, Fundación Antonio Pérez, Galería Nueva, CRUCE, and Teatro Pradillo, as well as in exhibitions and festivals in Brazil, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She currently resides in Madrid, with secondary bases in Brazil and the United Kingdom.