The Artbeat of Madrid. Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend.

Mid-September in Madrid, and it was sunny, warm; honking taxis pepper the city’s grand boulevards, and passing flashes of emerald green parakeets light up under an infinite blue sky. I’m here for Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend, an annual event organised by Arte Madrid, held in the Spanish capital to bring together the city’s top galleries for a weekend of unique exhibitions and satellite events. This year, the event launches at the historic setting of the Lázaro Galdiano Foundation Museum. Apertura Madrid is both vibrant and youthful, providing a welcome break from the pageantry of larger art fairs. 

Waves of blue

The first stop on the gallery trail was to Galería Ehrhardt Flórez, for Luis Claramunt’s exhibition Sevilla, named after the time he spent painting there between 1985 and 1989. A self-taught painter, Claramunt is somewhat of a cult figure in Spain, but perhaps little-known internationally. Huge canvases of deep indigo dominate the gallery walls; against a stark and brightly lit room, undulating waves of blue paint crash across the canvas, like the view from the bow of a ship as it bounces perilously across a tumultuous ocean current, where glimpses of white foam shimmer under a fathomless night sky. 

Given his moody palette, these works appear anything but Seville-like, yet Claramunt’s vision is his own unique perspective, a chaotic blur of figuration melting into abstraction. In another room, smaller, more colourful works are hung in a row. Claramunt’s perspective is haunting and yet beautiful. The more figurative paintings remind me of Brassai’s Parisian night scenes; someone hunched over with a pipe, or a bustling café filled with crooked old patrons and frenzied waiters. 

Echoes of Mexico

Heading into Madrid’s Malasaña district, one of the city’s most vibrant neighbourhoods, there is the Blanca Berlin Gallery, where a retrospective exhibition of the Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo was on show. A large collection of Bravo’s black and white prints is on display, comprising photographs spanning more than 50 years. This exhibition encompasses some of the late-photographer’s more surreal and also most iconic works, including one particularly innovative photograph, Lucrecia, Ciudad de México, 1942, where Bravo employs the use of an X-ray to depict a dagger passing through his subject’s heart. 

His works are both mysterious and enchanting, with a lyrical abstract quality that makes the images hard to place historically. Working in parallel to the likes of Edward Weston and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bravo’s photographs offer a glimpse into the cultural rebirth Mexico experienced in the years following the Mexican Revolution, and offer a sense of poeticism and playfulness that sits slightly outside the canon for photographers of that era. There isn’t much of a theme or even a coherent thread to the exhibition, but the salon-style hang gives Bravo’s work the space to float freely as a set of individually captivating, haiku-like images. 

With events held throughout September and most exhibitions running well into late-October, Madrid Gallery Weekend is an inspiring and youthful affair that brings Spanish art to the forefront of the international cultural calendar. Other notable highlights include the exhibition of Stefan Sagmeister’s paintings held at Galería Hilario Galguera, a group show of prints from the likes of Philip Guston, Thomas Scheibitz and Julie Mehretu at Carlier Gebauer and an exhibition of Georg Karl Pfahler’s brightly coloured Hard Edge paintings held at Casado Santapau Gallery.

Architectures of absence

Lastly, to visit an exhibition of Thomas Demand’s lithographs at La Caja Negra Gallery meant journeying to the San Isidro neighbourhood, a nondescript suburb, just outside of the main ring of the city centre. This somewhat unremarkable setting feels quite apt, given that the work in Demand’s Portals series appears, on the surface at least, to be of quite flat, pedestrian-looking architecture. 

In Diamond Princess, Demand selects a view from the boxlike façade of a ship. Not just any ship, though, this is the Diamond Princess, the forsaken vessel which, in the early days of the COVID pandemic, was left stranded in the Port of Yokohama, Japan. In his essay A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (1997), David Foster Wallace described cruise ships as looking “less like a boat than like a building on its side”. Perhaps this is what initially attracted Demand to the vessel; its repetitious and sterile design fits perfectly with the cardboard cut-out aesthetic he has so masterfully created. 

In this work, Demand makes his return to the subject of an ill-fated cruise ship (after his 2012 work Pacific Sun, which took CCTV footage from a cruise-liner violently swaying in heavy seas, and recreated it minus the people who were thrown about amongst the furniture), this time opting for a simple, cropped view of the ship’s exterior. Here, Demand again makes the vessel passengerless, seemingly to draw the viewer’s scrutiny toward the architecture itself, while also questioning the authenticity and veracity of the image as an object. Demand’s chosen subjects are broad; he depicts controversial architectural projects ranging from America’s border wall to Intercontinental Bucharest and Albert Speer’s Haus der Kunst. What Demand does so cleverly is to offer a plain yet seductive view of these architectural spaces, all the while hiding a darker truth in plain sight, just beneath the work’s surface. 

Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend continues to highlight the role of the city’s galleries as both accessible and dynamic spaces for contemporary art. Celebrating the vitality of Madrid’s galleries, the 16th edition of Apertura aims to connect the local art scene with a global audience. Over the course of the weekend, visitors move between 55 galleries across the city, encountering a wide variety of exhibitions and experiencing contemporary art across different spaces and contexts. The event reinforces Madrid’s position as an active and internationally relevant centre for contemporary art, showcasing the city’s vibrant cultural landscape.

Written by Oliver Eglin