Contemporary art drinks from the great artists of the avant-garde, creators who squeezed the plastic languages to get the maximum expressiveness to color, shape or texture in contrast with the more traditional and academic figuration. We can not understand much of the emerging art without knowing the avant-garde masters, and in Art Madrid we have some of their most representative names.

Antoni Tàpies

Sense titol, 1970

Acrylic, graphite, collage and assembly on cardboard

28 x 39cm

Surrealism, abstract expressionism, the school of Cuenca, pop art, Equipo Crónica, the El Paso Group ... the avant-garde movements removed the foundations of art in the last century and its authors are the seed of the most current art. Conceptualism, site specific, ready made, material painting have their roots in those masters and there are galleries whose background is a treasure of the vanguards.

Antonio Saura

Charles, 1989

Oil on canvas

130 x 97cm

The Benlliure Gallery (Valencia) founded in 1984 and directed by Vicente and Alejandro Segrelles has specialized in these consolidated values without neglecting young artists. In these 20 years they have exposed artists of recognized prestige, painting of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, School of Paris, El Paso Group, historical Vanguard, Spanish landscape of the twentieth century, highlighting their collective exhibitions entitled "Muestra Benlliure" where they annually exhibit selected works of reknowned authors. In Art Madrid'18 they propose a collective exhibition of different reference authors, belonging to the El Paso group, such as Luis Feito, Antonio Saura or the eclectic Luis Gordillo, supporter of the new figuration. They also feature the work of José Guerrero, an American nationalized Spanish engraver and painter framed within abstract expressionism, and artists such as Carmen Calvo, Eduardo Chillida, Juan Genovés, Manuel Hernández Mompó, Joan Hernández Pijuan, Miquel Navarro, Jaume Plensa, Antoni Tàpies, Juan Uslé and Manolo Valdés.

Joan Miró

Peinture VI, 1969

Oil on canvas

27 x 16cm

For its part, the Marc Calzada Gallery (Barcelona), founded in 1996, presents in Art Madrid'18 a collective that unites the figure of Joan Miró with the artists present at the controversial Spanish exhibition of the XXXVII Venice Biennial of 1976, entitled "Artistic Vanguard and Social Reality: Spain 1936-1976".

Marc Calzada will turn his stand into the fair in a mini Biennial of the 76th with the work of Miró and those artists he chose to accompany him in Venice: Picasso, Calder, Alberto Sánchez, Josep Renau, Dau al Set, El Paso, Eduardo Arroyo, Alberto Corazón, Chillida, Oscar Domínguez, Equipo Crónica, Team 57, Juan Genovés, Gordillo, Millares, Lucio Muñoz, Oteiza, Palazuelo, Saura or Tàpies ... A true journey through the history of Spanish "new art".

The CEART opens this Thursday, November 14th in the room A an exhibition dedicated to this master of photography, which will be open to the public until February 9th. The show includes one of the artist's latest projects, focused on the hard work carried out by the miners of Serra Pelada, an open gold mine in the heart of Brazil where employees daily risked their lives.

Immigration, poverty, marginal life, slave labour, man's relationship with the land, the use of natural resources... are issues that have always fascinated Salgado. From the beginning of his career as a photographer, his work has opted to give visibility to the most disadvantaged groups and to create with his images a vivid and impressive visual story without fakes. With a raw black and white, this author's work transits between photo-reportage and naturalistic photography.

And the idea that permeates all his work is human dignity. Salgado portrays employees, miners and gatherers from a purely humanistic approach that wants to value their integrity, their strength and their resilience.

“If you photograph a human, so that he is not represented in a noble way, there is no reason to take the picture. That is my way of seeing things.”

Salgado entered this discipline long after completing his studies in economics between Brazil and the United States, and a doctorate in statistics in France. But in 1973 his life took a turn, and he decided to start his career as a photographer. He achieved to work at the Gamma Agency and Magnum Photos for more than 15 years until in 1994 he founded his own agency “Amazonas Imagen”.

With the “Gold” project, the photographer portrays a harsh reality that takes place in the Serra Pelada mine, a name given to a totally devastated and anarchically excavated mining enclave, the world's largest open-pit gold mine, through which more than 50,000 people have passed. In the heat of the legends about the mysterious “El Dorado”, the enthusiasm for this precious metal led to the development of strenuous exploitation practices for the workers and to originate tales of grief and glory, of human victory and defeat between the soil, the tunnels and the cargo baskets.

The CEART exhibition brings together Salgado's full portfolio in his characteristical black and white and large-format photographs that leave no one indifferent.