An Overview of Madrid Art Week: ARCO and Art Madrid

From March 6th to 9th, Madrid held what is known as Art Week. Various fairs were held, coinciding with some high-profile exhibitions in museums, foundations, cultural centers, and art galleries. All of this generated enormous interest in these events among audiences from various cities across the country, as well as from abroad, placing the Spanish capital at the epicenter of global art.

In any case, we will focus only on two of the fairs, ARCO and Art Madrid, as both offered very different but complementary offerings, allowing visitors, whether collectors or not, to observe or acquire works by internationally renowned artists at very high prices that are accessible to everyone.

ARCO. One of the most important international fairs in the field of contemporary art

ARCO has now celebrated its 44th edition, making it one of the longest-running international fairs. This year's edition attracted approximately 100,000 visitors over the five days of the fair. A total of 214 galleries—including around fifty from Latin America—from 36 countries participated. 178 of these exhibited their works in the General Program, while the rest were included in Wametisé: Ideas for an Amazon Futurism, Profiles/Latin American Art, and Opening: New Galleries. There were also stands from Cultural Spaces, Media, and, above all, the International Artist's Book and Contemporary Publishing Fair ArtsLibris, with the presence of around one hundred publishers from various countries. This year, the exhibition celebrated its tenth edition in Madrid. ArtLibris is also being presented in other cities, including Barcelona, where it originally originated, Lisbon, and Guadalajara, Mexico, which is celebrating its first edition.

It is important to highlight that various institutions, including the Spanish Ministry of Culture and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, have acquired several works, primarily by women, with the aim of strengthening, or rather, addressing, the deficit museums face in this area. For example, the Reina Sofía Museum only has 13% women artists, considering its collection of around 25,000 works. It's also worth highlighting that this year's edition hasn't seen any controversy, unlike in previous years. The works that have received some media attention have been few and rather anecdotal, as is the case with the piece White Washing by conceptual artist Eugenio Merino, who presents a controversial work each year, always in collaboration with the Barcelona gallery ADN. This work features a series of 16 current political figures who are hotly debated worldwide, including Trump, Milei, Musk, Le Pen, Abascal, Meloni, and Netanyahu. Their faces are printed on plates placed in a dishwasher. The artist points out that "provocation must be in art. Every work defies some logic." The work sold for €22,000.

Since it is very difficult and complex to comment here on most of the proposals from the participating galleries, I would only like to mention those that seemed most interesting to me or that at least raised aspects that represent the most avant-garde art that an event like this deserves, mainly within the Latin American spectrum. This is the case of the Zielinsky gallery, which has two locations, one in Sao Paulo and one in Barcelona, and has exhibited the work of four artists: Panamanian Cisco Merel, Brazilians Vera Chaves and Denise Milan, and Chilean Felipe Mujica. They all belong to different generations, but they have in common their fascination with abstraction using different materials and techniques. Furthermore, they are drawn to ancestral traditions from an artisanal and popular perspective.