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".

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.