Iberian pride: a Madrileño tour
Madrid is certainly one of Europe’s most attractive cities today, particularly as regards cultural life: as Maribel López, the charismatic director of the ARCO Fair, said on the event’s opening day.
Alongside its dazzling permanent collection, the Reina Sofia Museum, for one, teems with tourists, but also ordinary citizens and school trips, presenting an exhibition that is well worth the long wait to enter its rooms: the show on the great Catalan artist Antoni Tàpies, the most extensive retrospective devoted to him to date, the year of his centenary. La práctica del arte is a hypnotic glimpse into the artist’s poetic universe, influenced at the start of his career by the stylistic neighbourhood of Surrealism, a movement led by his contemporary André Breton. Tàpies, an anti-francoist and defender of Catalan autonomy, took part in the third Documenta in Kassel in 1964; affiliated with the Informal Movement, whose greatest Italian figure was Alberto Burri – who shared with his Spanish colleague a repudiation of fascism and a first-person account of the Second World War – Tàpies explored a variety of pictorial materials, proving his ability to create paintings with (almost) everything at his fingertips: wood and plaster, sand and acrylic, concrete and cardboard. Stressing the harsh reality of the Spanish dictatorship and honouring the poet Federico García Lorca, he also denounced the Balkan genocide of the early 1990s whilst representing his country at the 1993 Venice Biennale, where he won the Golden Lion. Ultimately, la prática of Tàpies has never seemed so fresh to us, a process of thinking of art as an ideal and everlasting struggle against the conflicts that are still tearing the planet apart.
Within the cultural offer offered outside ARCO, there was another institutional moment at the Portuguese Embassy in Madrid: with Artists join the embassy, the palace was turned into an exhibition venue for the third time, until March 22. This time around, the occasion provided a platform to showcase a small body of work from the Gulbenkian Collection in Lisbon, in the run-up to the reopening of the Modern Art Centre on September 20, especially curated by the artist Leonor Antunes, who will be undertaking an unprecedented project for the occasion.
On the subject of galleries, Pedro Cera‘s new headquarters should be highlighted first and foremost. The opening in the Spanish capital brings into play the dialogue between the paintings of artist Adam Pendleton and the sculptures of Arlene Shechet: the black and white of the canvases, mixed with the shiny ceramic works, make for a fascinating landscape, going beyond stylistic identification and delving into the relationship between forms, both in the surroundings and between themselves.
Located on Calle de Barceló, Pedro Cera has joined the major galleries in Madrid’s historic centre, including Albarrán Bourdais, which is hosting Pedro Cabrita Reis’ first project with the gallery this season: with this singular venue in mind, the artist has developed a site-specific work blending architectural structures, landscape paintings and neon lights, all of which represent the fragility of a museum. Be that as it may, all interpretative possibilities are left open: Cabrita Reis offers us an alternative idea of an atmosphere connected to culture, providing us with enigmas.
Just a few steps further on, we reach Calle San Lorenzo, home to the Elba Benítez gallery, where the latest work by Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa is on show.
Transposing and metamorphosing the patterns of Modernist architecture is the key topic of the exhibition π = 3.1416. Between geometric frames constructed using brightly painted wood and metal components, we are gripped by the installation Toda utopia passa por la barriga: Garaicoa builds an imagined profile of a city using glass jars in which he fits miniature buildings resembling Rationalism’s greatest architectural examples, attaching them to products symbolic of the staple diet and economy of different populations around the world, also reflecting on the topics of production and sustainable development.
Travesía Cuatro helped us discover the captivating story of the poet and artist Jorge Eduardo Eielson (1924-2006). Born in Peru, he spent time in several European countries and divided his artistic practice between avant-garde expressions and his country’s ancestral knowledge, opening up new cultural and visual perspectives.
The Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation (Turin, Guarene, Venice and Madrid) has been offering the community a special project in Madrid since 2020. This year, Hans-Ulrich Obrist curated the exhibition in which the artist Precious Okoyomon created a total artwork combining multiple disciplines on Montaña de los Gatos in El Retiro Park, recreating a forest within the circular vaulted structure that supports the small hill, permeating it with the scent of earth, trees and flowers, and hiding an animatronic creature inside, When the Lambs Rise Against the Bird of Prey. As the title suggests, the figure of the lamb stands up against predators and apocalyptic scenarios, reshaping itself in the spellbound world created by Precious as opposed to its traditional identity as a martyred animal. Surreal.
The Arte y Naturaleza and Horizontes y Limites exhibitions at CaixaForum have a powerful connection with the present and keep a powerful poetic alive in contemporary times. From Georgia O’Keeffe to Shezad Dawood, from Pino Pascali to Alexander Calder, the two exhibitions are seemingly woven together to reconstruct a way of thinking about environmental change, analysing both the cultural approach to nature that human beings have taken in the most varied places on the planet and the distinctive changes of the Anthropocene epoch.
The Complutense Art Centre is in Ciudad Universitaria and, keeping in line with ARCO’s focus on the Caribbean this year, the leading figure is Dominican artist Jorge Pineda. He died just over a year ago but left behind a four-decade legacy of work through which he aimed to awaken consciences. With a body of work that includes almost 50 works – including large installations, paintings, drawings and sculptures -, collected under the title HAPPY, Pineda carved out a universe in which the public becomes an active part of the works, engaging with them in an emotional as well as cognitive sense. Visiting is definitely worth it.
To round off, along with other things that happened in Madrid during art week, there was the opening – exclusively for the media – of part of the collection of the legendary Ella Cisneros, who has just released a novel inspired by her life. Asked if she had ever considered recreating a foundation like the one she once had in Miami, Ella replied that she is waiting for three elements to come together: the economic factor, the political factor and the geographical factor. We will surely need to wait patiently.