Once again, Liquitex, the world's leading brand in professional acrylics, joins Art Madrid as a sponsor, supporting contemporary creation through a prize, which will be awarded to one of the artists participating in the fair who works with acrylics in their pieces. The prize will be awarded on 23 February at 18:00 pm will be worth 1,000 euros in Liquitex products.

The history of Liquitex begins with Henry Levison, a colour chemist who ran a company in the USA called Permanent Pigments, which manufactured oil colours for artists from 1933. The acrylics that were first developed in the early 20th century were solvent-based colour compounds. In 1955, Henry perfected the formula with a water-based acrylic that was commercially viable. This was the first acrylic gesso, called Liquitex, a perfect combination of liquid and texture.

New colours in the Heavy Body range

Here are some of the 12 new colours in the Heavy Body range:

LIGHT BISMUTH YELLOW A toned-down version of the iconic Bismuth Yellow, well known in watercolour technique, excellent for blending and highlighting.

LIGHT BISMUTH YELLOW

LIGHT PHTHALOCYANINE GREEN A strong, vivid and opaque colour, excellent for blending natural greens, beautiful greys and pastel shades.

LIGHT PHTHALOCYANINE GREEN

INDIGO A deep, dark midnight blue, ideal for mixing black, grey, green and purple tints.

INDIGO

TRANSPARENT ORANGE A completely transparent orange with a deep orange-red mass tone and a yellowish tinge made from a hybrid pigment: an innovation in pigment manufacturing that combines organic and inorganic pigments.

TRANSPARENT ORANGE

IRIDESCENT ROSE GOLD A beautiful opaque colour that reveals an iridescent sheen with hints of pink and golden tones.

IRIDESCENT ROSE GOLD

Liquitex currently offers a wide range of colours in different, fully intermixable formats, as well as additives and accessories. One of its most popular ranges is Heavy Body Acrylic, its thickest bodied, high viscosity, pigment-rich acrylic. With a high concentration of lightfast, artist-quality pigments and a satin finish, Heavy Body Acrylic provides rich, permanent colour with crisp brush strokes and knife marks. It is available in a wide range of 116 colours with the recent addition of 12 new colours.

In the year 2020 in the heart of Barcelona a wandering gallery was born, the same one that in February 2021 would debut at Art Madrid with an exhibition proposal focused on contemporary portraits; with this subject matter it would manage to create a powerful dialogue between artwork and audience and make the seal Inéditad remain in the history of the event that contained it.

Jean Carlos Puerto. Protección. Oil and copper leaf on wood. 60 x 48. 2021. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Since that first time and until today, the wandering gallery has managed to build projects on otherness, has repositioned in the spotlight the discourses on the LGTBIQ+ collective, has consolidated a group of artists who share its principles of resilience and empathy and the best thing is that it continues to bet from the professionalism and commitment to give voice to the difference.

Claudio Petit-Laurent.. El Joven de la Perla. Oil on wood. 30 x 30 cm. 2023. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Inéditad Gallery, thanks to its founder Luis López, its collaborators and the infinite possibilities manifested in the works of the artists it represents, is a gallery that has demonstrated its capacity and courage to stimulate the sensibility of the public through art and seduce a generation that moves between the glass window and the analogical story. Inéditad is a nomadic gallery that has gathered around it a community of artists and has moved the context with exhibition projects that think about LGTBIQ+ art without prejudices.

Pepa Salas Vilar. Las marcas del arcoiris. Oil on canvas. 40 x 50 cm. 2022. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Pride and Prejudice was inaugurated. An exhibition that brings together the works of sixteen artists: Abel Carrillo, Alex Domènech, Carlos Enfedaque, Silvia Flechoso, Jamalajama, Daniel Jaén, Claudio Petit-Laurent, Jean Carlos Puerto, Fernando Romero, Pablo Rodríguez, Pepa Salas Vilar, Jack Smith, Pablo Sola, Bran Sólo, Elia Tomás and Utürüo. Painting, illustration, photography and digital art are the manifestations that bring into dialogue around fifty neatly threaded pieces, in a discursive line that discusses such a latent phenomenon as discrimination. To achieve this, the artists invited to the exhibition question themselves whether: Does discrimination exist within the LGTBIQ+ collective?

Pride and Prejudice Official Poster. Image courtesy of the gallery.

With approaches on and from the body, the proposal invites to celebrate diversity, proposes to question and self-question the prejudices and attitudes of society against the collective. Pride and Prejudice is a space for dialogue about the constructs imposed on us by society. It is also an oasis in which to deconstruct with tolerance and respect the subjectivities that sometimes prevent us from approaching the production of the participating artists, simply because "the beautiful" does not fit in an androgynous body. The subjugation of stereotypes are pressed with determination to find the beauty of diversity in other palpable facets of reality.

Pablo Sola. All men are dogs. Photography. 2014. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Throughout these three years Inéditad has stimulated the vindictive projection towards bad practices, has questioned estates around the LGTBIQ+ body and the most admirable thing, is that these capacities have resurfaced around the dialogue and the visual narrative of the stories that are told from the visual: Artworks that are people, art that is, per se, humanity. Overcome impositions and accept what is different in order to continue fighting against homophobia, biphobia, lesbophobia or transphobia and defend the equal rights that all the acronyms of the collective deserve in our community.

That's Pride and Prejudice: One creature, the happiest in the world. And maybe other projects and other people have said it - or felt it - before, but none so fairly.

Silvia Flechoso. Hola, soy maricón. Oil on canvas. 73 x 54 cm. 2023. Image courtesy of the gallery.

From June 8th until June 22nd you can visit Pride and Prejudice. Carrer de Palau núm. 4. Canal Gallery space. Barcelona.