Everything is ready for celebrating Art Madrid'19! All is prepared for the inauguration of the 14th edition: painting, sculpture, photography, video art, performance or more hybrid arts; the most international edition is coming!

This year, the wide and varied proposal of Art Madrid stands out for the remarkable international character. In this sense, Art Madrid presents a unique perspective of the South American art scene, highlighting certain proposals such as the collective O-Art Project, Collage Habana, Zielinsky or Kreisler. Also, the South African and French-African tendencies are singularly represented this year, with artists from different origins and selections such as the Oda Gallery or Norty galleries will present.

Photo: Ester Arteaga.

Some countries especially represented through their artists are Germany, Portugal, France, the United States or Taiwan. New visions that the audience can discover in São Mamede, Schmalfuss, Robert Dress, Paulo Nunes, Barrou Planquart, Hispánica o Yiri Arts’ booths. Other galleries’ proposals are very international, such as the Art Lounge, the MH Art Gallery, 3 punts or the BAT Alberto Cornejo Gallery. The selections by Marita Segovia, Lola & the Unicorn, Montsequi o Víctor Lope galleries stand out as well.

Photo: Miguel Ángel Satue.

As always, the national creation is one of the strong points of the fair, showcasing an exceptional overview of current Spanish art, as shown by Miquel Alzueta, Rodrigo Juarranz, Aurora Vigil-Escalera, Espiral, Fucking Art, Luisa Pita, Arancha Osoro, Moret Art, Alba Cabrera, Bea Villamarín, Shiras, Cornión, Jorge Alcolea or Kur Art proposals.

Manuela Eichner

Pistoeira, 2018

Collage on wood

50 x 50cm

Once again Art Madrid presents the ONE PROJECT program, conceived to support and promote young artists whose careers are in an initial or intermediate state. The project takes place in a curated proposal within the fair in which the works of the creators are presented in a solo show format while maintaining a unitary vision. This year, one of the great updates of the program is the incorporation of Nerea Ubieto, art critic and curator who presents a new proposal led only by female artists. This choice, as stated by Ubieto, is based “on the eagerness to level an unstable balance in which female participation in art fairs is still today unfair”.

Alejandra Atarés

Palmeras Azules, 2018

Oil and acrylic on linen

114 x 146cm

Virginia Rivas

Atisbar, 2018

Acrylic and graphite on canvas

146 x 114cm

Under the title "Ficciones, máscaras y paisajes: el color como telón de fondo", 7 artists feature specific proposals for the fair in which the international presence stands out again. As the curator explains, the works invite us to build our own universes, because "through creation, we can get rid of the burdens that slow down the development of society, dissolve stereotypes, invent new ones, own what we want to change and, effectively, transform it. No limits are worth having, just more or less believable masks; only colour with a more or less positive charge”.

The authors of the interventions and works presented are Rūta Vadlugaitė (represented by Contour Art Gallery, Vilna), Virginia Rivas (DDR Art Gallery, Madrid), Mara Caffarone (Granada Gallery, Comuna), Nuria Mora (About Art, Lugo), Sofía Echeverri (Flux Zone, Ciudad de México), Manuela Eichner (RV Cultura e Arte, Salvador) y Alejandra Atarés (Víctor Lope Arte Contemporáneo, Barcelona).

Rubén Martín de Lucas, "República # 12" image, 2019.

Another of the great news of this edition is related to the Guest Artist, Rubén Martín de Lucas, a multidisciplinary creator who, after his step as co-founder of the collective Boa Mistura, continued his solo career with a line of work on the relationship between the individual and the territory. Martín de Lucas features new works from the “Repúblicas Mínimas” series, within the celebrated “Stupid Borders” project: an exciting work to reflect on the geopolitical borders and the sense of ownership under a look both critical and poetic. This series will be presented in a new outstanding format at Art Madrid.

Foto. Perucha.

Also, Art Madrid'19 visitors will be surprised by the different participatory actions that they will discover at the booth of Cultura Inquieta, official media partner of this edition. Also, you can take a break, enjoy a craft beer and comment on everything seen at the fair, in the space that Cervezas La Virgen will have in the Lounge area. For their part, at the VEGAP spot they will be able to see the extensive work carried out by this organisation: from the management in Spain of the Intellectual Property rights of the visual creators, representing more than 150,000 artists from 46 countries, to the development of projects such as the VEGAP Image Bank, the "Proposals" annual contest or the "Art and Law" Publishing Collection.

In short, Art Madrid'19 is once again a great opportunity to approach an excellent panorama of the contemporary creation, with a wide and varied proposal that stands out for its increasingly international character and its permanent commitment to young creators and forms of newest creation. Don’t miss the new edition of Art Madrid, the most friendly art fair that includes everyone!

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.