Reviews

Within the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, dreams, stories, and ideas brought by Ofrenda still linger. Yet, even more present are the thoughts left suspended in the air by the audience.

Intricate between action and register, El Apartamento hosts Algo deja quien se va, the first solo exhibition in Spain by Reynier Leyva Novo (Havana, Cuba, 1983). Starting from the political concept of historical memory and linking it to the issues of power and colonialism, the artist unfolds in two well-differentiated series his proposal to approach these lines, and extends his networks to the impact (or influence) they have on the institutional and cultural fabric.

Madrid-based Maisterravalbuena proposes a vindication of the work of Sarah Grilo (Buenos Aires, Argentina,1917 - Madrid, Spain, 2007) through Soluciones para pensar, the second exhibition on this artist at the gallery. With a didactic and rediscovery vocation, the exhibition gathers a selection of paintings in different formats made between the 1960s and 1990s, many of them unpublished to the public. This work of selection and direct work of the gallery with the archive and the legacy of the Argentinean artist becomes fundamental in the structuring of the objective of creating opportunities for a greater knowledge of Grilo's work.

Located in KM 113 of the federal highway that connects Salina Cruz to Pinotepa Nacional, a remote creative jewel stands. Architecture, design, and art cohabit along this section of the Oaxacan coast. A mix of boutique accommodations, gastronomy, and contemporary art proposals enrich Puerto Escondido’s endowment of inspiration and creation.

The Hochschild Correa Collection boasts of being the most complete private collection of contemporary art from the Peruvian Amazon. Nevertheless, for more than a decade, it has been built on a varied and unrestricted collection, which has made it possible to bring together the different trends and techniques currently being used in the region, with a focus on dialogue and a certain relational patina among the works that make up the collection. 

About to turn 92, Anna Bella Geiger, from Rio de Janeiro, never ceases to attest to her robust experimental side with each new exhibition featuring snippets of her shifting production. Both in Brazil and abroad, in solo and group shows, her body of work remains indomitable, uncompromising and full of meaning.

The work that Lúa Coderch (Iquitos, Peru, 1982) has been doing around language takes over her recent solo show at Madrid's The Ryder Projects to consolidate a new relational vision of communicative practices. Exhausted and exuberant, title of this partially retrospective and almost thesis exhibition, also responds to the two apparently opposite moods, but with an inexorable link, of the vital needs that seep into contemporary society between individuals and a certain extimacy that, organically, seems to have been imposed.

Gabriel O'Shea (Metepec, Mexico, 1998) manages to delve into that huge and apparent dichotomy between the technological and the human (or the future and the real) in his most recent proposal at Hilario Galguera's Madrid headquarters, a series of paintings of high conceptual content that critically debate on several technical and thinking aspects.

Under the enlightening title of Los espacios del pánico (Estudios superficiales sobre el vacío y el color) (The spaces of panic-Surface studies on emptiness and color), the interesting individual exhibition that the Madrid gallery El Apartamento dedicates to Luis Enrique Lopez-Chavez (Manzanillo, Cuba, 1988) is developed as a thesis scenario for the almost scientific analysis that the Cuban artist has developed around the space of the void and the chromatic.

Museo Casa de la Moneda, in Madrid, celebrates in an exhibition the career of Liliana Porter (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1941) through several conceptual key points of it, designing a necessary route to cover, in a succinct but very representative way, one of the most relevant productions of the last decades of conceptual art.

The Reina Sofia Museum presents in the exhibition Opera to a Black Venus a necessary journey to the work of Grada Kilomba (Lisbon, Portugal, 1968), forming the most complete exhibition of her work to date in Spain. The Portuguese artist presents a complete discourse, mainly expressed through the different languages of movement, from the body to performance, but without leaving aside other narrative and artistic techniques with which she analytically presents a certain introspective look at the world of history.

Goya's Los Disparates preceded, or marked, painting's entry into modernity. Beyond this historiographical note, the series by the Aragonese master captures with masterful imagery the vicissitudes of irony, sarcasm and the darkness of a reality that has lasted through time to the present day. The plates of his etchings become the surface that deposits this reality, and the result, once impregnated, works as a full reminder of the origin of our essence, our fears and our actions.

Shocking and enigmatic, this is the first major retrospective in Europe that the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art presents of Olga de Amaral, a key figure in the Colombian art scene and Fiber Art. The exhibition brings together nearly 90 works created between the 1960s and the present, many of which have never been presented outside Colombia.

To paint the forest beings is the Special Project of Pinta Miami 2024. Curated by Irene Gelfman and Giuliana Vidarte, it brings together paintings by Shipibo-konibo indigenous artists with representations of the flora, fauna and cosmovision of the Peruvian Amazon to rethink the past, present and future of the planet.

Inhotim is presenting three new projects at the end of 2024, in which the protagonists are Rebeca Carapiá, Pipilotti Rist and Rivane Neuenschwander. Three very different strategies by names of different visibilities and generations, which help to forge a moment in the institution that seems more connected to the fascinating and special nature of the place, without leaving aside lively questions about the strange days we are living through.

Sol Calero (Caracas, Venezuela, 1982) uses the guanabana, a fruit endemic to Central America and the Caribbean, to symbolically instrumentalize the creation of a representation of the feelings of belonging, home, everyday life and stereotypes through the wide conquest of the spaces of the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, transformed for the occasion into visual and popular references of a well-known and recognized Latin America.

Nebulosa de la calabaza is the title of the first solo exhibition presented in Spain by Tabita Rezaire (Paris, France, 1989), an artist living in French Guiana. Renowned for her use of new media and multidisciplinarity to explore the relationship between contemporary worlds transited from technology and their relationship with the most ancestral and spiritual environment, the Guyanese-heritage artist focuses her production on activism from the perspective of denunciation from feminism and decolonization as key points.

The section dedicated to abstraction in the Strangers Everywhere / Stranieri Ouvunque exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2024 explores how artists from the Global South -particularly those from Latin America- pursued less rigorous forms, undulating lines and a vibrant color palette stemming from references of their own.

Cecilia Lenardón's Special Project at Pinta BAphoto, curated by Irene Gelfman, presents an installation that pushes the representation of the body through photography to the limit, transforming the static image into a living and performative experience. Entitled Cuatro piezas clave (Four Key Pieces), the work invites us to reflect on the body's boundaries and its capacity to tolerate effort and repetition.

The eighth edition of Video Project, curated by Irene Gelfman, invites us to immerse in the concept of territory through the moving image. In video art we find a sense of curiosity and exploration that challenges our ideas of materiality and expands to embrace the most intimate. In six selected works, the notion of territory addresses bodies, landscapes and symbols, questioning the stability of physical and conceptual limits. The territory becomes a fluctuating space, as critical as the viewer's place.

In an art industry that increasingly advocates following the lines established by cultural policies, it is always comforting to return to thesis themes, to environments that draw from social and historiographic sources, of course, but also from myths and a well-understood anthropology. You can go deeper in subtitles and lines or you can put together a skeleton, but the overview can also be a reward these days.

The 2024 Venice Biennale has taken a profound interest on cyclical themes, with water emerging as a dominant motif across exhibitions. In resonance to Pedrosa’s title for this year ‘Stranieri Ovunque’, we see water as a dominant locus for the subjects of travel, shared heritage and fluctuation. On itself, water is seen (as both a vital resource and a destructive force) at the heart of the pavilions representing Greece, France, and in Otero Torres’ Arsenale installation, Aguacero. These exhibitions delve into water’s duality: as a life-giver and a potential destroyer, as a symbol of both division and connection.

The Venice Biennale 2024 offers an exceptional platform for examining the challenges and opportunities facing the future. The pavilions of Japan, Germany, Switzerland and Hungary trace different forms of looking at and thinking about the world to come, projecting visions of the environment, equilibrium, adaptation, world order and, of course, collective memory.

From her different interdisciplinary perspectives, Cecilia Paredes (Lima, Peru, 1950) lands in Blanca Berlin with a collection of images that deal with imaginary cartographies, displacements and human relations in their conceptual part, materialized, above all, on canvas as the main exhibition material. In Historias errantes (Wandering Stories), the Peruvian artist bets on recovering graphic materials anchored in antiquity, such as astrological charts, engravings of discoveries and maps, which become, after the manipulation of the parts, absolute compositions of impossible -but also aesthetic- iconography.