Art Madrid'26 – TRANSOCEANIC ART MADRID: FROM CUBA TO TAIPEI GOING BY PUERTO RICO

 

Santiago Rodríguez Olazábal. FOOTPRINTS. Set 31 drawings. Mixed media on card stock. Variable dimensions. 2016

 

 

The Collage Habana Gallery, located on San Rafael, the central boulevard of the Cuban city, has more than 10 years experience in the promotion and commercialization of local arts with a catalog of artists from different generations, young creators and established masters In the Cuban arts scene, many of them awarded with the National Prize for Plastic Arts, such as masters Manuel Mendive and Roberto Fabelo. Since 2004, it is the gallery that leads the Center of Visual Arts of the Cuban Fund for Cultural Property, where they reflect the aesthetic plurality of the art of the Island, from its projects and exhibitions.

 

The proposal they bring to Art Madrid includes the work of José Bedia, Roberto Fabelo, Santiago Rodríguez de Olazábal and Guibert Rosales. It will be a pleasure to see again the art works of the master Fabelo, painter, draftsman, engraver, illustrator and sculptor who has won numerous prizes and mentions, among them the UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of Fine Arts in Paris (1996) National Prize of Cuban Plastic Arts (2004) or Distinction for National Culture, both granted by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Cuba.

 

 

 

Roldan Lauzan. Hierofante - Hierophant - Oil on canvas - 150 x 140 cm - 2016

 

 

Another Cuban, Galería Moleiros, was founded in 1999 with the aim of internationalizing contemporary Cuban art. Directed by René Moleiros, he represents both masters of the late twentieth century, such as Roberto Fabelo, Zaida del Rio and Manuel Mendive, as well as emerging artists, leading to numerous international fairs.

 

In Art Madrid'17 he bets by these artists: Rubén Alpízar, Roldan Lauzan, Yamir Izquierdo, Daniel Collazo. We highlight here the work of the young Roldan Laúzan (Havana, 1987) who has participated in collective exhibitions such as "Sabor Metálico", in Villa Manuela Gallery in Havana, "Intersections", Izabelle Lesmeister Gallery (Regenburg, Germany) Artis 7 and 18 ", at Galería Post it (Havana, Cuba). He has attended international fairs such as "ART KARLSRUHE" Contemporany Art Fair or "ART BODENSEE", Contemporary Art Fair Liebe FreundInnen der Kunst in Dornbirn, Austria. He has also collaborated with more than 35 publications for Cuban and foreign publishers. His work, oil or acrylics, shows an excellent mastery of the art of portraiture and a palette of his own with which he represents familiar characters in strange characterizations. Roldán wonders about our identity, dual identities or even the loss of identity.

 

 

Aimée Joaristi. Higgs boson 2 - Mixed technique on paper - 80 cm x 80 cm - 2016

 

 

The Klaus Steinmetz Art Contemporary gallery was founded in December 2000. Since then they have performed dozens of exhibitions with many Latin American artists such as Luis González Palma, Javier Marín, José Bedia, Botero, Adriana Varejao, but it is in the international scene where they have been more active, participating in fairs such as Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Lima, Bogotá, Caracas, Miami, Monaco, Madrid and Basel. They have also participated in exhibitions in collaboration with museums and galleries from more than twenty countries. In May of 2013, the gallery triumphed with the most important exhibition of its history: a monograph of Peter Halley (New York, 1953) and his abstraction and expressionism in dialogue with the geometric painting.

 

To participate in Art Madrid, they present the work of Aimée Joaristi, Gabriel Rigo and Nanda Botella. Joaristi's painting has won great recognition at festivals and fairs such as the 5th Riga International Triennial in Latvia, the V Biennial of Guayaquil in Ecuador or the award obtained at the TAG Gallery, Brussels at the International Art Dubai Project. The work of Joaristi is expression and abstraction in pure state, taking the dripping and the stain to almost sculptural states.

 

 

Mónica Subidé. Everydayness at risk of extinction -Oil, pencil and collage on wood - 75 x 120 cm - 2016

 

 

Yiri Arts was founded in 2014 with the spirit of being a "Every Days Art Museum" and the goal of makes art to penetrate and enrich people's lives. Through the curatorship, exhibitions, publications and international fairs, they present inspiring works full of vitality. They have galleries in Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung's Pier-2 Space, but also run multidisciplinary venues in Taipei, combining art and literature, and in 2014 they co-founded the Taipei Free Art fair, because they think art can be discovered anywhere.


Its freshness arrives to Art Madrid through the work of Chen Yun, Wang Guan-Jhen, Monica Subidé and Núria Farré. Catalan artist Mónica Subidé (Barcelona, ??1974), represented by Yiri Arts, has exhibited individually in the Eternal Espai, in Bj Art Gallery and in the Fidel Balaguer Gallery, all of them in Barcelona. He has also participated in collective exhibitions such as "Big and Feliceful 2.0" in Yiri Arts, Taiwan, Ramfjord Gallery, Oslo, Norway, Bj Art Gallery, Paris, France and in Catalan galleries like Esther Montoriol Gallery in Barcelona. His work, with certain influence of art brut, regains the taste for the draft and the origins of the drawing, and she mixes the pencil lines with energetic colored brushstrokes in apparently unstructured scenes and compositions.

 

 

 


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.