Notes related to España

There is something structural in the Museo La Neomudéjar that allows plastic initiatives such as those of Heriberto Nieves (Vega Alta, Puerto Rico, 1957) to acquire greater meaning thanks to the dialogue with the space offered by this Madrid institution.

Carolina Caycedo’s (London, UK, 1978) Tierra de los amigos (Land of Friends) arrives at the IVAM in Valencia after its run at the Artium museum in Vitoria.

Freedom First is the first solo exhibition that Fernando Bryce (Lima, Peru, 1965) presents at 1 Mira Madrid and is practically a declaration of intentions.

"If you hear a voice within you say, "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced".Vincent Van Gogh

The Green Havana project is a captured sample of a time and an attitude, the same one that transits between evasion and hedonism and the social reality of the Cuban capital, a unique and referential site of that almost isolated Cuba and of a popular culture grown in the shadow of political influences.

Delcy Morelos (Tierralta, Colombia, 1967) lands at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC) in Seville with Profundis, an exhibition that gathers the spectacular intervention she has made ex profeso in the monumental areas of the Sevillian institution and that focuses on revitalizing the ancestral link of man with the earth, as well as capturing, through botany, the symbolism of the relations between Europe and America.

Standing before the expressive forcefulness of Mexican-American Robert Nava (East Chicago, USA, 1985) can be risky. At first glance, the primitivism in the technique used in his canvases is shocking in the conversion of the strength of the stroke and the basics of the gesture into a language that agglutinates a brute force. Perhaps for that reason, the usual tendency of those who face his work is to quickly pigeonhole it out of the academic, out of that refinement that is presupposed -although less and less- to those who fill the room of a museum, to let themselves be carried away by the urgency of expression in front of that pretended good taste.

For some time now, the Inéditos program carried out by La Casa Encendida -an institution of the Montemadrid Foundation- has become a more or less reliable thermometer of the emerging curatorial scene that has Spain as its epicenter. As a result of that consolidation, within that faithful reflection, the Spanish social and artistic structure itself plays a very prominent role.

Included within the activities of the program Transcultura. Integrating Cuba, the Caribbean and the European Union through Culture and Creativity, an initiative coordinated by the European Union and implemented by UNESCO in Havana, fifteen young Caribbean photographers between the ages of 18 and 35 will participate in PHotoESPAÑA 2024 with the presentation of their recent work, in addition to being able to interact professionally with cultural agents and the sector.

Patricio Reig (San Juan, Argentina, 1952) exhibits at the Centre Cultural La Mercè in Girona Anatomía de la mirada, a proposal that deals with the dissection of the act of looking and its individual and subjective approach.

Héctor Canonge began to explore the possibilities of performance almost without being aware of it. With an extensive career in the field of new media and the art surrounding these technologies, and almost by inertia, he incorporates the use of his body in one of his installations, Schema CorpoReal, where his body covered by bar codes was scanned by the public so that, through texts that emerged referring to parts of his body, they ended up constructing a narrative of identity.

It could have been an ordinary retrospective, but the decision to participate in some way in the creative process is a differential and even declarative point in Tembló acá un delirio, the exhibition that Museo CA2M in Móstoles delves into the figure, and at first hand, of Ana Gallardo (Rosario, Argentina, 1958).

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Metahaven. Chaos Theory. This is the first exhibition of the year in the Film & Video room, a space that the Museum dedicates entirely to video art, audiovisual installation and moving image as artistic languages, and which celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2024.

The Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (MEIAC) in Badajoz is exhibiting, under the title Paisaje Transferido, a wide-ranging show by MartÍn Lopez Lam (Lima, Peru, 1981), one of the main exponents of graphic art in Spain, where he has been living for the last two decades.

Tania Pardo (Madrid, Spain, 1976) is the new Director of the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M Museum), the museum of contemporary art of the Community of Madrid. Pardo's career until her recent appointment has been built on a detailed work of promotion and visibility of emerging art through the curatorial actions she has developed in numerous Spanish institutions.

The Seville-based Fundación Valentín de Madariaga y Oya raises in its collective exhibition Herencia. Proyecto 360º the need to reconsider actions and return to the essential and almost primary link through the observation and analysis of our environment and its possibilities. The show gathers the work of fifteen international artists who become instrumental through their works for this purpose.

Bosco Sodi (Mexico, 1970) explores deeply in El día que nos volvimos a encontrar a universe quite distant from his recognizable large format and liveliness production to delve into the pleasures of the search for new material expressions and the abandonment of the chromatic in favour of texture, the depth of the absence of colour and concept.

Valencian gallery Jorge Lopez is programming a solo exhibition by artist Claudia Joskowizc (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, 1968) that brings together the audiovisual and performative techniques with which the Bolivian artist builds the narrative and chronology of her native country.

Flavio Garciandía (Caibarién, Cuba, 1954) becomes the active and passive subject of his work in his first solo exhibition in Madrid.

The vindication of the Peruvian Jorge Eduardo Eielson (Lima, Peru, 1924) looks fundamental, far beyond any framed motivation in the round figures of the anniversaries. However, the work being done around the centenary of his birth shows a titanic effort to explore one of the most versatile artists in the plastic arts and, perhaps in his best-known aspect, in the literature of contemporary Peru.

Latin American surrealist photography will have a predominant place in the 4th edition of the Castilla y León International Photography Festival, to be held from April 17 in Palencia, Spain.

Casa de América inaugurated two exhibitions of Peruvian art: Memoria del Perú. Photographs 1890-1950, with works by various photographers that capture a significant period in the country's history, and Shipibo-Konibo. Portraits of my blood, with photographs by artist David Diaz on the life of the Shipibo-Konibo.

The geometry in Jorge Cabieses' (Lima, Peru, 1971) usual outline is broken with the action of the spontaneity of the curved and almost organic stroke in his second solo exhibition in the Spanish capital. The Lima-born artist thus proposes, in a certain way, a dialogue between the artificial of the synthetic and the atavistic through the incorporation of those more spontaneous brushstrokes over the usual framework of rectitude that the artist usually presents.

Two decades after Miguel Ángel Rojas (1946, Bogotá, Colombia) conceptualized in his project David Quiebramales his denunciation of violence and the use of education as the most efficient vehicle towards a catharsis for those who suffer it, the Madrid headquarters of La Cometa revisits his most emblematic work and reinterprets it as the framework for a kind of thematic retrospective. This commemoration of that first David Quiebramales reinforces a view that is still difficult to overcome and that, even today, serves to trace those harmful social dynamics that are created between society and war, the institutional and the political systems.

The exhibition Teresa Solar Abbourd. Pájaro sueño de máquina (Bird dream of machine) in CA2M Museum presents two large installations that condense the artist's research in recent years. It is curated by Tania Pardo and Claudia Segura Campins.

Popular at IVAM Centre Julio González is an exhibition and research that revolves around the question: what is popular? 

The CA2M (Museum Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo) presents the exhibition Ana Gallardo. Tembló acá un delirio. (A delirium trembled here). Curated by Alfredo Aracil and Violeta Janeiro, the show runs from March 2 to July 7, 2024. 

The Spanish international art fair ARCOmadrid takes place from March 6 to 10 with a great number of Latin American proposals, curatorial projects, galleries and artists.

The 43rd edition of ARCOmadrid, Spain's International Contemporary Art Fair, has at its core the program The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean, which revolves around the artistic scenes of the territories connected by that sea.