ARCOmadrid 2022 returns this year and celebrates its 40 (+1) Anniversary with excellent art content. A total of 185 galleries from 30 countries; 159 galleries are included in the General Programme, here’s a guided tour in pictures.
Zilberman Gallery
In Antonio Cosentino’s works, one finds a wealth of images distilled from everyday life, the depths of the individual, memory, and the visual culture of the artist’s city. While the shifting character of highbrow and low-brow art was being discussed in the 90’s contemporary art milieus, Cosentino and his artist friends undertook, as it were, the archaeology of a gaze which brought subculture into question. It is from this period on that Cosentino’s painting incorporated materials from the visual culture of our geography without letting one dominate the others: panels, signboards, wrappings and ceramic tiles.
3+1 Arte Contemporânea
Alberto Carneiro’s work is characterised by a closeness to landscape and nature, a link to ontological sculptural material and to identity and identification of his own body in relation to the natural elements. His educational career also influenced various generations of artists and architects.
Galerie Perrotin
Tavares Strachan’s conceptual, interdisciplinary practice activates connections between art, science, history, and cultural critique to mobilize our senses, intellect and curiosity, asking us to consider our own relationship to what is seen and what is unseen.
Themes of invisibility, displacement and loss are elemental to Strachan’s investigations, which question ensconced systems and truisms by reframing canonized bodies of histories, and unsettling the conditions by which some are legitimised and others obscured. He uses the rubric of received knowledge to make networks and structures of power more visible, and to bring to light forgotten or little-known historical epics and human achievements. Strachan embodies the migratory, cross-cultural, multidisciplinary, and open-ended nature of contemporary artmaking.
Rosa Santos
With an installative approximation to different mediums like sculpture, video, photography or painting, the artist revises the iconographic imaginary around the idea of happiness, putting special attention to the phenomenons related with the emotions and the management of stress as well as the construction of an idealized nature. Her creative process starts with the accumulation of materials, becoming the studio a space for trial, where objects and images from the most diverse origins live together staging a ritual of the intimate. In her practice we sense a preciosity constructed through precarious and old materials, as well as the search of equilibrium between order and disorder, control and chance, reason and emotion.
Bruno Múrias
The post-symbolic universe of Jorge Queiroz crosses drawing and painting into a diachronic dialogue in which both artistic practices contaminate and influence each other. His self-fictionalised scenarios are not inhabited by any organisation or hierarchy, subverting the relationship figure-background or interior-exterior in an intimate and personal imaginary. It has been a constant in his work the absence of linguistics and a narrative linearity.
Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea
Noé Sendas began presenting his work in the late Nineties. Explicit and implicit references to artists and literary, cinematic or musical creations are part of his raw materials. Specific concerns about the reflection and practise of visual arts can also be added to his repertoire. These include: the body, as an entity that is simultaneously theoretical and material; the observer’s perception mechanisms; or the discursive potential of exhibition methods.
Filomena Soares
Kiluanji Kia Henda’s connection with music and avant-garde theatre is an integral part of his education as do his collaborations with various collectives and artists in Luanda.
Freijo Gallery
Trazos migratorios [“Migratory Traces”], 2014 2019, consists of pieces of cloth of the same format embroidered by 24 anonymous women who work as vendors in the streets of Mexico City; the artist, through this piece, by repeating almost identical elements, in which the features that differentiate them are barely perceived, manifests the invisibility of “informal” working women in the context of a post -colonial country.
Galería Patricia Ready
Info from galleries
ARCOmadrid 2022 is on view until the 27th of February.