DDR Art Gallery is participating for the second consecutive year in the One Project program of Art Madrid. “Variaciones" by Virgina Rivas and "Avatares" by Roberto López can be seen at the Fair as part of the project "Salvajes. La cage aux fauves", curated by Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta.

The art works that the artist Virginia Rivas (Madrid,1981) will present in Art Madrid are part of a wide project called "Variaciones", in which the artist investigates about the color in our environment as well as the perception that we have of the same one depending on our emotional state and of the political and social situation of each one of us. Rivas analyzes our reality through colors.

The artist from Extremadura experiments with painting from a classical pictorial process, investigating forms and matter through abstraction and gesture. Rivas also relies on other artistic media such as photography in its various forms (polaroids, slides, etc.), video, light boxes or neon.

Virginia Rivas, Estudio AVNT, 2019

Virginia Rivas incorporates in some of her works small written texts, generally fragmented and sometimes practically illegible, but which are part of a narrative discourse that is totally intentional on the part of the artist, who integrates the graphics of the words as another plastic element of the composition. The expressiveness of the gesture, the colour, the light and the words are part of the abstraction inherent in her work, through which Rivas investigates intimacy and collectivity, establishing a fundamental game in which space and the spectator are indispensable.

The tandem of artists participating in Art Madrid with DDR Art Gallery is completed by Roberto López Martín (Madrid, 1982). "Los niños tele, el nuevo homo videns" includes a series of works with which he participates in "Salvajes". The artist works with different plastic languages that range from his studies in graphite and wax to his collages, present in another series such as "Fluffy Children". In Art Madrid, the artistic proposal is centred on his sculptures, known as "avatars" worked in fibreglass, resin and other materials.

Virginia Rivas, Estudio GTCCR, 2019

In "Avatares", López Martín focuses on childhood, on the innocence of the child when he begins to create a relationship with the objects around him, giving his toys imaginary values and personalizing them in a subjective way. This relationship, according to the artist, "is distorted when corporations enter to participate establishing uses and forms of consumption on the different toys, making these pre-format a way to relate to the world of children".

Roberto López's sinister avatars fight against all manipulation by the toy industry and in his "ready made" pieces he reconstructs and assembles pieces he finds in the garbage or selects consciously using his sense of humor and his most perverse sensibility.

RLM

Avatar Cowboy, 2017

Tela sobre fibra de vidrio y resina

150 x 30cm

DDR Art Gallery focuses its efforts on promoting the work of both established and emerging Latin American artists. In the virtual space of DDR Art Gallery, we find works from almost all disciplines: photography, sculpture, collage, illustration and urban art. DDR Art Gallery were pioneers in the direct sale of contemporary art on the Instagram platform, and without a doubt, the presence both online and in social networks, is the basis of the project since its inception. Its main motto is: "If you're not on Google, you don't exist."

RLM

Avatar El Elegido, 2016

Tela sobre fibra de vidrio y resina

150 x 30cm

Since it was founded in 2006, the gallery maintains two lines to promote the work of its artists: online sales and attendance at national and international fairs, with a clear focus on the contemporary art market. A third line of promotion and sale is the space of Theredoom Gallery in Madrid, where DDR Art Gallery organizes individual and thematic exhibitions. In addition to Rivas and López Martín, DDR promotes the work of six other artists: Annita Klimt, David Delgado Ruiz, David Heras Verde, Evangelina Esparza, José A. Vallejo and Raúl Casassola.

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.