For 45 years, ARCOmadrid has been in operation long enough for generational shifts to occur in both the galleries that bring work to the gallery and the collectors who frequent it. You should know director Maribel Lopez, who has been in this position for 15 years. She was once a gallery owner herself (“I wasn’t a good gallerist – but I was a passionate gallerist!”), and the experience shaped her devotion to and respect for “the gallery as an institution.” When she joined ARCOmadrid in 2011, the gallery was going through difficult economic times. “It was difficult to convince galleries to come to Spain,” she told the Observer. “This has changed radically in these years.”
By 2015-2016, the economy in Spain was improving and things were starting to turn around. “As a constant, we have not changed our approach to what is important to us. We have never chased the big galleries… Sometimes they want to come, sometimes they don’t. We don’t chase them because that, for me, changes the ecosystem too much. ARCO is a fair where people come to discover new artists, find interesting pieces but not at the highest prices.”
In its latest edition, which was held from March 4 to 8 with the participation of 211 galleries from 30 countries, there was no sign of a midlife crisis. The goal, according to Lopez, is “business sustainability more than profit” because ARCOmadrid feeds the Fundación ARCO, which encourages art collecting, contemporary art research and the dissemination of artistic trends and techniques. Founded in 1987, the foundation’s collection includes pieces by Ryan Gander, Beatriz Gonzalez, Carlos Mota, Oscar Muñoz, Adam Pendleton, Laure Provost, and Danh Vu.
ARCOmadrid continues to serve as the focal point for Latin America in Europe. The participation rate in the exhibition this year was 34 percent from Spaniards and 66 percent from abroad, with more than 31 percent of international exhibitions coming from 11 countries in Latin America with a notable presence from Brazil and Argentina. López noted that Madrid outside of ARCO is “very vibrant” not only institutionally but also because art galleries from Latin America are opening up second spaces locally, and Latin American collectors are infusing the scene with new energy.
The Madrid Memoria exhibition makes its exhibition debut in this edition. “If you’re not at ARCO, you’re not doing anything,” declared gallery employee Maria Gonzalez. She and her colleague Amalia Pascua were wearing round red stickers reading “Cultural VAT Now” in Spanish to show their loyalty to the strike taking place during the exhibition. (The Spanish government introduced the possibility of VAT reform in 2024 but did not implement it. By comparison, France, Germany and Italy have all carried out VAT reforms.) This generated “a sense of community within the galleries; we have a common goal, we are fighting for a common strategy,” Pasqua said. Gonzalez added that it is important to democratize art, “and this is terrible for artists and galleries, so we are protesting this.”
The pavilion displayed a six-metre-long canvas by Spanish-born Chilean artist Roser Bru – the highest-priced work in the gallery at €45,000 – brought from Chile and mounted on a wooden structure. “We based the organization on this,” Pasqua noted. The work references an elegiac poem by Pablo Neruda (“Spain in Our Hearts”) and also reuses Robert Capa’s famous image of the fallen soldier repeatedly. The Memoria project space is dedicated to Terry Holiday, a trans woman in her 70s (twice the average life expectancy of a trans woman in Mexico). Pasqua noted that the project space is “a tribute to her life and the struggles she had, but it’s also an ode to the joy she brings… She’s empowering herself and standing up for all those who can’t and those who can’t, telling the story of her friends… because she has a voice.”
Although the Memoria space is new, it was not part of ARCOmadrid’s new exhibitions section curated by Rafa Barber and Anisa Touati, which showcased galleries that had been in operation for less than eight years. The section included booths from emerging spaces in Athens, Istanbul, Tbilisi, Ljubljana and Cape Town, as well as exo gallery from Paris, which was showcasing Ash Love – whose work has been shown at Casa de Velázquez, a French institution based in Madrid for nearly a century. “In this context, we thought it would be interesting to display his work in this residence,” noted Elissa Rigolet, gallery owner. This was the first time the French gallery had participated in ARCOmadrid – although they had shown Ash Love at Art Basel Paris in October – and it seemed like a successful inclusion. “Sometimes exhibitions can be slow, and this is very dynamic,” Rigolet said.
One piece of Ash Love, an acrylic box filled with compressed Mylar balloons and party dust, as if Armand were a party-goer, sold on the VIP day for €2,500, and an oil on linen by Yann Stéphane Bisso sold for €3,000. Another emerging gallery, New York Gratin, led by Madrid-born gallerist Andrea Torrelia, showed works by 28-year-old self-taught German artist Max Jahn, who paints portraits on copper in a nod to the Old Masters. The Grattin Pavilion, whose works range in price from $12,000 to $22,000, was sold out on a VIP day for European art institutions and groups.
Among the most experienced participants in the exhibition was Chantal Crousel from Paris. Niklas Svenung, Crusel’s son and the gallery’s director, confirms that his mother started coming to ARCOmadrid in 1980. The gallery participates in nine art fairs each year, and Svenung feels that “ARCO has gained great generosity and seems to be a very real alternative to other ways of navigating the art fair agenda that we know is very intense. I think ARCO has always managed to be very ambitious, but very human and friendly at the same time.” He frames the gallery’s philosophy as “people who are also interested in an alternative to, say, the Anglo-Saxon way of doing art” and appreciates that “year after year, it seems… very healthy, intellectually”.
The gallery held a group show, with works by Anri Sala being the most expensive at €25,000, while those by José María Secilia were the most expensive at €90,000. Sicily, with whom the gallery has worked for more than 40 years, is presenting a show of light pieces and ornately mirrored folding screens at Madrid’s Leiria Palace, a sprawling neoclassical private house and estate. There was also a work in the pavilion by Wolfgang Tillmans, currently visiting professor at Beaux-arts de Paris and pieces made in 2025 by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Abraham Cruzvillegas and Gabriel Orozco.
Galería Rafael Ortiz, based in Madrid and Seville, which has been involved in the fair since 1986, brought silver gelatin prints by Graciela Iturbide (which were sold on VIP Day), bright gouache on paper by Equipo 57, geometric and graphic acrylic on canvas by Manuel Barbadillo and mixed wood, metal and lead sculptures by Carmen Calvo. The works in the pavilion ranged from €2,000 to €95,000. There was also a special project dedicated to Coro Gonzalez, because, as gallery owner Rosalia Ortiz said, he shows “only two.” [works] By one artist makes it really difficult for visitors to understand a profession. González’s paintings on canvas were so dense with fine lines that they seemed to have been made with pen, and combined with unique multicolored ceramics and ink drawings on paper, they served as a kind of “mini-gallery.”
Gallery owner Rosemary Schwarzwalder, another veteran who has been involved since the 1980s and also served on ARCOmadrid’s selection committee for seven years, noted that Naschist St. Stefan of the Vienna Pavilion tended to be “minimalist and abstract.” “This art fair is always a platform,” she said [through which] People meet each other. Either you meet artists, you meet art collectors, you meet friends like this, and you learn about another culture. She was offering Katharina Gross, with whom she had worked for more than 25 years, a painting priced at 265,000 euros, as well as a small textile work by Sheila Hicks for 48,000 euros. There were also works by Czech-born Luiza Kasalecki – “a great talent with her very own language” – and Jungseok Yoon – “who was a late bloomer… We met maybe when she was a little over 50, but she was very active, and she really wanted to get into this art market.”
Ultimately, the atmosphere last weekend at the IFEMA Convention Center was good. As Chantal Crossel’s Svenung said: “It’s a complex time, but ARCO and an art gallery like this are able to provide a sense of community, high-mindedness, exchange and tolerance, which is important at all costs today.”
More at art fairs, biennials and triennials
