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Art Madrid: "An accessible, current and committed Fair"
22January
InterviewEventsSemana de Arte en Madrid

Art Madrid: "An accessible, current and committed Fair"

From February 27 to March 3, 2019, the Art Madrid Contemporary Art Fair will celebrate its fourteenth edition. For the sixth consecutive year, the almost 2800 m2 of the Crystal Gallery of CentroCentro Cibeles will host the most recent creations of long and medium-career artists, as well as young talents from 14 countries in Europe, America, Asia and Africa.

Alberto Cornejo, current director of one of the most important events of the Art Week in Madrid, shared with Arte por Excelencias the particularities of this edition, of which our magazine will be again a media partner.

What's new in this 14th edition of the Fair?

This fourteenth edition brings many new features. First, international participation has increased almost twice, which reaffirms the confidence and greater involvement of the international arena in Art Madrid. We have 26 national and 16 foreign galleries that will exhibit works by almost 200 artists.

Another of the great novelties is in the One Project program that, after the brilliant work of the specialist Carlos Delgado Mayordomo during the last years, is renewed with the incorporation of the critic and curator Nerea Ubieto, responsible for this section of the Fair in which the unpublished works are presented in "solo show" format.

On the other hand, this year we have developed an extensive parallel program dedicated to video art, curated by Mario Gutiérrez Cru, director of the Projector Video Art Festival. Perhaps a somewhat risky program, taking into account that it is an artistic discipline that does not usually stand out in the exhibition circuits but that, without a doubt, is an art form with absolute relevance in contemporary creation, for which we were especially interested in contributing to its diffusion and its potential collection.

We have also organized a series of activities on dates prior to the Fair that include workshops, screenings, master class, debates and meetings with artists such as Eugenio Ampudia, Elena Córdoba or Rogelio López Cuenca ... and collectors like Teresa Sapey, also counting on the collaboration of spaces such as CaixaForum Madrid and Sala Alcalá 31.

Finally, I would also like to highlight that in this edition we have consolidated relationships and alliances with outstanding institutions in the medium and long term.

 

Art Madrid

 

Will we see galleries that have participated in previous editions?

Of course. We are happy that a good number of them repeat, as are the cases of the national Aurora Vigil-Escalera (Gijón), 3 punts (Barcelona), Alba Cabrera (Valencia), Arancha Osoro (Oviedo), Luisa Pita (Santiago de Compostela) , Espiral (Noja), Marita Segovia (Madrid), Kreisler (Madrid), Rodrigo Juarranz (Aranda de Duero, Burgos) or BAT Alberto Cornejo (Madrid), among others. Also foreign galleries return like Art Lounge (Lisbon), Schmalfuss (Berlin), Yiri Arts (Taipei) or Collage Havana (Havana).

In addition, more than 10 participating galleries are premiered for the first time, such as the Spanish DDR Art Gallery (Madrid), the French Galerie Barrou Planquart (Paris), the Portuguese Galeria São Mamede (Porto), the South African ODA Gallery (Franschhoek), the Italian IDEA4MI (Milan) or the Lithuanian Contour Art Gallery (Vilnius).

In addition to Collage Havana, will there be other Latin American galleries?

Yes, in fact, in this edition there is a prominent presence of Latin American galleries. For years we have count with the participation of Collage Habana, to which were added RV Cultura e Arte (Salvador de Bahía, Brazil), the new Granada Gallery (Comuna, Argentina), Flux Zone (Mexico City) and the collective Peruvian Artistic O-Art Project (Lima).

What theme will guide One Project? Who is part of the program this year?

This year the program has been entrusted to the critic and curator Nerea Ubieto, who has selected a total of seven unpublished projects of women artists, a strategy that responds to the interest of Ubieto, as well as ours, to equilibrate the balance and favor the necessary representation of the creators at the fairs. The proposal, worked together by the curator and the artists, is eminently pictorial and is centered on the different expressive qualities of color and form.

This One Project has a majority of international presence and an outstanding representation of Ibero-American galleries and artists, with the participation of Sofía Echeverri (Mexico), Mara Caffarone (Argentina), Manuela Eichner (Brazil), Rūta Vadlugaitė (Lithuania) and the Spaniards Virginia Rivas, Nuria Mora and Alejandra Atarés.

How important is this program within Art Madrid?

On the one hand, the program has always been designed for young and mid-career artists, with which we give support, dissemination and promotion to these artists at a crucial moment in their careers. And on the other hand, its importance also lies in the presentation of unpublished works, that is, works carried out in a specific and novel way for the Fair.

Why have you chosen Rubén Martín de Lucas as Guest Artist of this edition?

Martín de Lucas represents the creative values ​​we want to support. He is an artist in constant evolution, who after working as a co-founder of the collective Boa Mistura, decided to start his solo career in 2015. We are interested because he is a creator who risks and experiments with new languages, media and disciplines, and at the same time, he does it maintaining a very solid conceptual discourse, also critical and fully coherent in relation to its trajectory.

In addition, his latest projects are focused on video art, something that connects this author with the thematic line of the Art Madrid'19 parallel program.

 

Minimum Republic 5. Rubén Martín de Lucas
Minimum Republic 5. Rubén Martín de Lucas

 

After almost a year of activity, what reception has Art Madrid Market had?

We are certainly very satisfied with the balance of the first year of Art Madrid Market. After establishing a well-defined strategy, designed by our Marketing Director, Amador Crespo, we have created attractive content, always very careful and in an environment of total security, seeking to offer exclusive quality information that really serves to promote the promotion of artists and his works, as well as breaking down barriers and reaching new audiences.

Thematic exhibitions, monographs, virtual galleries, present related news, all aligned with social networks, has given us a great impact in the different online channels.

Although the Spanish art market in the network is still young, it is on the way to a first consolidation and, in this way, Art Madrid will continue betting to differentiate itself as one of the online references.

What are the challenges for the future of Art Madrid?

On the one hand, we want to continue improving those aspects that we consider fundamental and that have defined our Fair as a project that bets on the quality and rigor of the proposals. This is a constant in the evolution of the event and we wish to maintain this rhythm of progress, with an increasingly international profile and adapted to the demands of the sector.

We aspire to consolidate as a reference for new collectors, because Art Madrid is an accessible, current and committed Fair with new creative talents as well as with new platforms (online).

On the other hand, we want to stand out as a project that generates spaces of reflection and that welcomes new artistic languages, something that we channel above all through the parallel program. We work to make contemporary art more accessible to everyone, and this requires adaptation, innovation and capacity for change.

Photos: @yricardo