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!

One of the proposals included in the calendar of the “Art Madrid-Proyector'20” program was the organisation of several meetings with artists within the fair. This gave visitors the opportunity to get to know their work better and open a personal dialogue with them after the presentation of their last lines of work. From Wednesday 26th to Saturday 29th of February, we had the participation of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, Fernando Baena, Mario Santamaría and Maia Navas, a group of creators who work with the moving image, but also with the installation, technological art, performance and video art.

Abelardo Gil-Fournier's work revolves around the hybridization between the real and the sensible. This artist and researcher approaches this question in his works from a perspective in which perception, image and material production merge. Both his artistic and research practice deal with issues related to land use and plant growth without losing sight of these three points of interest. This results in works that incorporate the presence of nature from various perspectives, sometimes as a space of experimentation in which to reflect on the connection between art and politics, the relationship of the human being with the environment or the criteria for landscape intervention.

During his presentation on Wednesday 26th, Abelardo told us about some of his latest projects, in which the presence of technology is key to offering an artistic interpretation of the individual's impact into the territory. All this affects issues such as agricultural techniques, the progressive deforestation or the exploitation of land resources. The result is colour-coded pattern drawings that break down the analyzed landscape and offer a more visual and technology-based reinterpretation of these human behaviours. In addition, in this meeting, the artist explained his work “The Quivering of the Reed”, an installation that mixes video image, sound and material elements, and that plays the role of mixing the sensory with the real.

Abelardo Gil-Fournier

Fernando Baena shared a talk with us on the afternoon of Thursday 27th. This artist has focused a large part of his work on performance, happening and video pieces, many of them designed to capture the result of the action and give the work a second life in a new format. The main subjects that monopolize his work range from the treatment of sexuality and gender issues, to migratory movements and the drama of refugees, the exercise of political freedom and thought ... all of them are far-reaching issues that Fernando addresses from a familiar approach, with the use of common materials and recognizable environments. Another of the characteristics of his work is the presence of Marianela León in many of his pieces, a performer who has been collaborating with Fernando for many years until becoming almost an alter ego of himself and starring in most actions that take place in public spaces.

In this meeting, Fernando was able to explain part of his creative processes and to highlight a key aspect to the performance artist: to understand the reaction of the public. In this way, the impact of a work conceived from the theoretical plane is also analyzed, the meaning of which can completely change depending on the viewer's perception. As he himself explained in the talk regarding his piece "Balsa":

"What started out as a performance with an established script ended up being a happening in which the public participated with sometimes unusual reactions".

For his part, Mario Santamaría, who was with us on February 28th, shared with us a completely different work from Fernando's. This artist is focused on the analysis of the use of data, the feeling of manipulation and lack of control over our information that is produced in the digital medium and the desire to transform into something real some ideas as ethereal and commonplace today as the use of virtual storage clouds, the location of web pages or the data flow over the Internet. Much of his work, documented on video or transformed into technological facilities, is a form of research on the impact of the digital medium on our daily lives. His desire to bring these terms to the material plane, which we handle in our language today without really understanding their meaning, has led him to visit server bunkers, storage warehouses, in addition to tracking the exact location of the servers that host his own website to find isolated places far away from humanity.

Mario proposed a material trip to this reality to demonstrate that we are facing a very fragile system, whose durability is sensitive to natural phenomena, as evidenced by some of the documentation work carried out, where he rescued images of wild animals entering these data centres and endangering the livelihood of the digital world.

Mario Santamaría

Finally, Maia Navas, recently arrived from Argentina, shared with us the afternoon of Saturday 29th in a chat in which she told us about her creative work as well as her experience at the head of Play-Videoarte, a festival entirely dedicated to this discipline that she co-founded in 2012, and that in these six editions has combined an annual exhibition with a program of activities that take place in the City of Corrientes (Argentina), at the Cultural Centre of the University Extension that depends on the National University of the Northeast (UNNE).

Maia has a degree in psychology, as well as a degree in arts and technology, and combine her artistic career with teaching. The impact of psychology among her work topics is evident, and some of her video works try to delve into disturbing and perplexing aspects of human behaviour, such as the series "Procedures" that we could watch during the presentation. In it, the artist portrays the daily lives of people affected by OCD syndrome with an excellent visual narrative that puts the accent, almost with a cinematographic vision, on the personal experience of this phenomenon.

Maia Navas, foto de Marc Cisneros

From Art Madrid, we want to thank all these artists for sharing their creative experience with us and giving us the opportunity to dialogue with them about their present and future projects.