Notes related to Spain

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.

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.

Fundación Casa de Mexico in Spain hosts the exhibition Modern Art of Mexico, with funds from the Blaisten Collection and curated by Daniel Garza Usabiaga, which takes an interesting look at the country's 20th century production through the eyes of Margarita Nelken (Madrid, Spain, 1894-Mexico City, Mexico, 1968).

The exhibition Beyond the Single Image. Spanish Photography from the Foto Colectania Collection, Barcelona, at The Marguiles Collection at the Warehouse in Miami, presents 150 works by 36 artists from the Foto Colectania Collection, that currently comprises more than 3,000 photographs by Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese authors, making it undoubtedly one of the most comprehensive private photography collections in the Iberian Peninsula. 

Isabella Despujols (Barquisemeto, Venezuela, 1994), Venezuelan artist based in Brazil, uses her artistic references for the realization of her latest series of works, a set made this year where textiles and embroidery are especially relevant, as well as the formal fact that they reflect. In them is palpable the conversation that he intends to maintain with those styles and languages that were fundamental in the countries to which he circumscribes his personal experience.

Based on the biologicist theories on territoriality and the relationships derived from living beings with their immediate environment, the Angeles Baños gallery from Badajoz proposes an exhibition project to three Latin American artists so that, through their experiences and their personal vision, they can materialize and express those feelings of territoriality, and always from the parallelism of the human being with the rest of living beings.

The Museum of Pontevedra exhibits Vento (wind, in Galician), the proposal that the artist Alberto Baraya (Bogota, Colombia, 1968) has developed and now shows at its headquarters in the Castelao Building as part of the cycle of exhibitions Infiltracións. This program aims to carry out specific projects that have as their backbone the dialogue arising from research and work with pieces from the collection of the Galician institution to promote re-readings on it.

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 Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art (CAAC) is showing Continuum or the appearance of the parts and the whole in its recovered space in the cellars of the institution's complex in Seville, an exhibition whose origin is to be sought in Profundis, the proposal that Colombian Delcy Morelos (Tierralta, Colombia, 1967) made for this same center this year and that served as a framework to sublimate, from the analysis, the dialogue beyond the material and the relationship she kept with her collaborators when it came to putting together her recent exhibition.