A look at ARCOmadrid 2024

Between blues: a look at ARCOmadrid 2024

In the just closed edition of ARCOmadrid 2024 there were works from different geographical latitudes and formats, reflecting on themes such as the decolonization of art, cultural heritage and institutional and gender violence.
Exhibited in the space designed by Ignacio G. Galán, Arantza Ozaeta and Álvaro Martín Fidalgo at ARCOmadrid 2024, which under the renewed direction of the brilliant Maribel López has dedicated its 43rd edition to the Caribbean with a focus on the shore, the tide, the current: an oceanic Caribbean (by curators Carla Acevedo-Yates and Sara Hermann), blue ice cream made with water from the Caribbean Sea (Helado de agua del mar Caribe, 2002-2024) – participatory “edible action” by the multidisciplinary artist Quisqueya Henríquez (of Cuban origin, lives and works in the Dominican Republic) – has the same tones of the sparkles that illuminate Untitled (2019) by the Italian Elisa Montessori (Génova, 1931). The long work occupies an entire wall of the stand of the gallery Monitor Roma, Lisbon, Pereto (AQ), with its floating abstract landscape of great poetic intensity, as is the work L'Erbario that Montessori made in 1978, among the acquisitions at ARCOmadrid 2024 at the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum in Madrid. Two artists belonging to different generations: both works, by the way, have already been exhibited in other contexts, the first in 2021 at the Malba-Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires and the second in the personal exhibition La camera bianca (2020) in the Fondazione Giuliani in Rome.

There were numerous references to the color blue, detectable in many other works of contemporary art among the hundreds on sale in pavilions 7 and 9 of the IFEMA Madrid exhibition center, which organized the event: there were the stainless steel modules and other materials in Cirrocumulus Uncinus Fluctus/M+I by Tomás Saraceno (neugerriemschneider, Berlin) and the wall that housed the textual installation Around the world by Lawrence Weiner (Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, Lisbon) was blue, as well as the skies from the series Landscapes painted in oil by Daniela Ortiz (àngels barcelona, Barcelona) that represented issues related to racism, patriarchy and immigration, also citing the activist Lolita Lebron (1919-2010), a charismatic figure on the Puerto Rican political scene.

With the presence of 205 galleries from 36 countries, ARCOmadrid has consolidated itself, once again, as a reference platform in Europe for the art of Central and Latin America, with a total of 38 galleries, especially from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, and the organization of a second section entitled Never the same. Latin American art, curated by Manuela Moscoso and José Esparza Chong Cuy, where the relationship with tradition and cultural heritage stands out.

The Peruvian Violeta Quispe Yupari (Vigil Gonzales, Buenos Aires and Cusco), daughter of Gaudencia Yupari and Juan Walberto Quispe, two artists originally from the peasant community of Sarhua, in the Andean region of Ayacucho, recovered the tradition of painting on wood ( Sarhua Tablets), using particularly vibrant colors to give voice to injustices and gender violence, thus affirming the power of art as a socio-political manifesto against injustice. From a similar perspective was the work of Daiara Tukano (Richard Saltoun Gallery, London and Rome), a Brazilian indigenous artist and activist who explores in a visionary way the mythology and spirituality of the Tukano community, to which she belongs, and their deep bond with nature.