Notes related to España

Maria Willis (Bogota, Colombia 1979) and Denilson Baniwa (Barcelos, Brazil, 1984) are the responsible for Wametisé: ideas for an amazofuturism, one of the special programs curated for ARCO 2025 and that navigates the Amazon and its growing impact on contemporary art. This proposal proposes a scenario of representation and dialogue through a selection of galleries and guest artists who will raise, through their works and their realities, the different conceptions of the Amazonian world and the possibilities of a collective future.

Madrid's Reina Sofia Museum, in collaboration with the Reina Sofia Museum Foundation, reinforces its growing involvement and strategy for the dissemination and study of Latin American contemporary art with the creation of the Cáder Institute of Central American Art (ICAC), dedicated to the research and dissemination of Central American art.

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.

The intervention Wasi Llamkha (Place and touch), by artist Andrea Canepa (Lima, Peru, 1980), stands on the South Patio of Madrid's Condeduque. This pavilion, designed as an ephemeral architectural structure, invites us to explore its sensorial value, far from the preeminence of the visual, and claims, by way of inspiration, the quipus, the forms of representation and recording of information from pre-Columbian Peru.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao hosts a retrospective exhibition of Tarsila do Amaral (Capivari, Brazil, 1886 - São Paulo, Brazil, 1973) focused on her conception and renovation of painting, as well as on her recognition as one of the key and most representative figures of the entry of avant-garde and modernizing pictorial languages in Latin America. A central name in Brazilian modernism, her style was consecrated as her own identity, a product of her desires and experiences, evoking both indigenous themes and the modernizing processes of a Brazil that was undergoing a constant transformation.

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.

Madrid's CentroCentro approaches the artistic production related to the Amazon with the exhibition Trópico sin tópico: Amazonas (Tropic without Topic: Amazon), curated by Halim Badawi (Barranquilla, Colombia, 1982), and with which it intends to facilitate new looks beyond the usual ones with which the European imaginary contemplates the indigenous legacy and its relation with the contemporary world.

Felipe Romero (Bogota, Colombia, 1992) usually shows in his photographic proposal a high interest in conflict zones. While the scenario reflects this palpable but still intangible tension, it also serves as a reflective framework where the conflict and its protagonists meet.

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. 

La Casa Encendida is planning a large part of its artistic, exhibition program this season around the concept of Verbos encendidos, a framework line of argument that frames the theme and the perspective from which certain public, political and social issues are approached from the institution. Escuchar (Listen) is the first verb, chosen to start with it a call for attention towards the construction of spaces and tools that allow to overcome differences and find common spaces of understanding.

The Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) spring 2025 exhibition, continents like seeds, brings together the work of La Chola Poblete (b. 1989, Argentina), Niño de Elche (b. 1985, Spain), and Pedro G. Romero (b. 1964, Spain); through sound, sculpture, performance, drawing, and painting, the show unravels and exposes the contradictions and ambiguities of colonial legacies.

La Virreina presents the exhibition Destructuras de poder, featuring the work of Regina Silveira (Porto Alegre, 1939), a multimedia artist and a key figure in Latin American and international conceptual art. This exhibition encompasses a significant part of the Brazilian artist’s research and artistic production.

Helga de Alvear (Kirn/Nahe, Germany, 1936-Madrid, Spain, 2025) passed away at the age of 88. A fundamental figure of collecting and gallerism in Spain and Europe, her name remains as a metaphorical vocative and reference of one of the keys to the evolution and understanding of how contemporary art should be shared and communicated to facilitate its appreciation as a fundamental part of the times in which she lived. A true believer that artistic practices should come to the surface and be another representation of the motifs and realities that shaped each period of history, convulsive in the case of Spain, she approached it with the vision and experience of someone who finds a necessary space to appreciate the present and build a future.

Casa de América, in Madrid, hosts Convergences / Divergences. Two Aesthetics in Dialogue, a complete exhibition curated by Ariel Jimenez in which Ye'kwana craftsmanship, a community of the Venezuelan Amazon rainforest, and modern and contemporary geometric abstraction, represented by more than a hundred works from the Juan Carlos Maldonado Collection, are in dialogue. The exhibition delves into the relationship between the different aesthetics developed contemporarily by both groups and, above all, highlights the reference to modern art movements and their partial debt to the techniques and motifs of the peoples of the Amazon.

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.

Es Baluard organizes Eugenio Dittborn. Pinturas Aeropostales, the first solo show in Spain of Eugenio Dittborn (Santiago, Chile, 1943), one of the key names in the development of Latin American conceptual art in the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition focuses on the production of his aeropostal paintings, an artistic instrument that materializes his research and reflection on materials, the physical limits that constrain painting and its distribution and circulation.

Visión y presencia, the cycle of performances by women artists organized by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, reaches its fourth edition with a renewed program where, once again, the Latin American presence will play a very prominent role. As in previous editions, ten will be the creative proposals that will be staged in different spaces of the Madrid museum and that will be linked to the concept of their proposals, notably revolving around feminism, traditions, colonialism, immigration or ecology.

Visión y presencia, the cycle of performances by women artists organized by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, reaches its fourth edition with a renewed program where, once again, the Latin American presence will play a very prominent role. As in previous editions, ten will be the creative proposals that will be staged in different spaces of the Madrid museum and that will be linked to the concept of their proposals, notably revolving around feminism, traditions, colonialism, immigration or ecology.

Canary Islands-based Mexican Gloria Godinez (Mexico City, Mexico, 1979) will be in charge of opening the cycle with Rojo descolonial en la pintura de Vincent van Gogh (Decolonial red in Vincent van Gogh's painting). The cycle will have a performative action every month, successively (except for July and August), and performances by Elisa Miralles, Yola Balanga, Cuba's Susana Pilar, Costa Rica's Eugenia S. Rudin, Paraguay's Eugenia Rudin and Elisa Miralles are scheduled. Rudin, Paraguay's Jessica Diaz, Chile's Laura Santander, Teresa Correa, Uruguay's Valentina Cardellino and Andrea Ghuisolfi, and O.R.G.I.A. along with three lectures by Brazilian curator Renata Ribeiro, Alma Cardoso and Diana Cuellar.

The Spanish Agency of International Cooperation for Development (AECID) has collaborated in the preparation of the program, as well as the Spanish Cultural Centers in Montevideo, Paraguay and Costa Rica and, for the first time, the Atlantic Center of Modern Art-CAAM of Gran Canaria.

Visión y presencia will be held from January 22 to December 10, 2025 at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Paseo del Prado, 8, Madrid (Spain).

The curatorial duo Carmen Lael Hines and Roberto Majano will be the new Head Curators at The RYDER Projects. This represents a new stage in the gallery that succeeds the period led by Rafa Barber, who has held this position heretofore.

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.

The incipient collection of MARCO of Vigo -under construction, but with enough funds to delimit its influence and incidence-, makes its debut in the delimitation of its radius of action with the first exhibition built exclusively with its own funds. For the occasion, the outline that unites Una imagen de sí builds on the general idea that will guide the near future: that Galician art dialogues with the outside world, mainly Latin America, and draws a relational history.

The CCCB (Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona) dedicates a wide, meticulous and interesting exhibition that takes us into the natural and cultural heritage of the Amazon, with special emphasis on the art and thought of the cities and indigenous communities of the region. Amazonia. The Ancestral Future brings to the table a detailed vision of artistic practices and Amazonian culture through the work of an extensive list of artists who produce around their thinking and relationship with nature.

The result of the selection proposed to represent Circuitos de Artes Plásticas 2024, one of the main emerging art projects of the Community of Madrid, has had in this edition a Latin American protagonist in the curatorial work of Isabella Lenzi (São Paulo, Brazil, 1986). The show, named Caja de resonancia (Resonance Box) for the occasion, reviews, through the ten winning works of this annual call, some of the recurring themes and matrixes in the under-35 generation of artists linked to Madrid.

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.

The exhibition Contar Rutinas (Counting Routines) dedicated by the Cerezales Antonino and Cinia Foundation to the work of Ana Amorim (São Paulo, Brazil, 1956) includes a selection of actions and performative works and installations that reflect the activity of the Brazilian artist from the 1980s to the present. The architecture of this exhibition is marked by the artist's daily conceptual and performative routines, reflecting their influence in the results of monumental dimensions.

Contemplando es como fuimos cambiando (Contemplating is how we changed) is the exhibition, the first one in Spain promoted by an institution, that the CICC Tabakalera in San Sebastian is dedicating to Gabriel Chaile (San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina, 1985), one of the most prominent names in contemporary Latin American sculpture. This proposal is intended to take an extensive look at his work, from his beginnings to his latest works produced in Lisbon, and which is recognizable by his monumental adobe, clay and metal pieces that reflect the morphology of the pre-Columbian ceramics of his native region.

ALTTRA Foundation organizes in three spaces in Palma, on the island of Mallorca, an exhibition that addresses the theme of insularity and its role and idiosyncrasy in a globalized world through several works by Cildo Meireles (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1948). The works chosen, corresponding to five different periods of the artistic production of one of the referents of Brazilian neo-conceptualism, trace a journey through some of the themes and investigations that the artist has developed throughout his life, from fortune and chance to the perception of the physically invisible but perceptible, such as sound, or the relationship between space and its use.

Arte al Día takes a look at the curatorial selection that highlights works by Ibero-American galleries in the NEXT, RADAR and Main sections of Pinta Miami. The curatorial team for the 2024 edition of the fair is integrated by Irene Gelfman -global curator of Pinta and co-curator of FORO and Special Project-, Giuliana Vidarte -curator of NEXT and co-curator of FORO and Special Project- and Angelica Arbelaez -curator of RADAR.

The Pinta Miami 2024 edition -from December 5 to 8- presents proposals that enhance the Latin American gene. Arte al Día highlights four galleries from four Latin American countries: Petrus Gallery in Puerto Rico, Proyecto H in Spain and Mexico, Salar Gallery in Bolivia and Judas Gallery in Chile.

Barcelona's Center of Image La Virreina (La Virreina Centre de la Imatge) is dedicating an extensive exhibition to Regina Silveira (Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1939), one of the multimedia artists and key figures of Latin American conceptual art. Within the exhibition line of the center, which advocates the exploration of the aesthetic and ideological languages of images, this show curated by Isabella Lenzi covers a wide range of the Brazilian artist's research, experimentation and artistic production, particularly that developed with technical reproduction techniques and the circulation of images.