Ten Trending Artists at ARCOmadrid
From hometown favorites to recent Venice Biennale stars, a quick look at ten trending artists at ARCOmadrid to help guide you through the fair.
Richard Mosse: With a major role at Leyendecker’s stellar photography-focused booth, Mosse’s photographs take center stage in Madrid. On view are several of his famed infrared photographs shot in the war-torn DRC—a body of work he also featured when representing his native Ireland at the Venice Biennale.
Wolfgang Tillmans: Tillmans is forever pushing the bounds of photography, examining its technological capabilities and overlaps with other media. To craft the images in his “Paper Drop” series on view at the fair, Tillmans exposed photosensitive paper to colored light and sculpted it into 3D forms, before photographing the constructions.
John Isaacs: A sculptor better known for his confrontational imagery of obese bodies and rotting corpses, Isaacs shows more understated neon work. It’s not without its punch though: the red and blue lights represent blood and tears.
José Lourenço: The up-and-coming Portuguese painter has a couple of his stunning, pop-inflected architectural paintings on view; more will know him from his prolific and impeccably witty Instagram account, where he has 75,000 followers.
Antonio Crespo Foix: Crespo Foix reveals his singular vision of space and form in his sculptures crafted from such lightweight materials as wires, pins, and plant fibers. The Spanish artist’s mysterious, poetic works somehow evoke both technology and nature.
Prudencio Irazabal: In his latest works, shown by Helga de Alvear (his Madrid gallery), Irazabal continues his career-long “research for the deepest substrates of painting.” He created these paintings in a laborious process, applying and reapplying coats of translucent paint sometimes for up to five years.
Liliana Porter: Working in everything from painting to video, Porter draws inspiration from René Magritte to create surrealistic scenes and juxtapositions. In Forced Labor, a seemingly abstract tondo painting is transformed into sweeping, bleak landscape by way of the tiny figurine embedded on its surface.
Santiago Giralda: The young Spanish painter was born and educated in Madrid, the same city he currently works in. His semi-abstract paintings aim to imagine an alternate reality. “By preparing new pictorial contexts,” he says, “I constantly question the functions of images and their insertion in our everyday life.”
Pablo Palazuelo: One of Madrid’s most famous artists of the 20th century, Palazuelo staked his reputation on a unique style of abstraction. Some of his profoundest influences included Klee, Picasso, and Gris.
Antti Laitinen: Featured in his native Finland’s #FocusFinland curated section, Laitinen shows works from Forest Square, the project he conceived for the 55th Venice Biennale. He chopped down a ten-meter square of forest, sorted it into component parts, then rearranged it into De Stijl-reminiscent composition.
