February 21–25, 2018
Application deadline: July 3
ARCOmadrid
Avda. del Partenón, 5
28042 Madrid
Spain
Building on the remarkable success of last year’s edition of the fair—which featured a stream-lined organization and a restricted number of galleries—ARCOmadrid 2018 will focus on continuing to enhance the calibre of art work at the fair. With the Spanish economy and art market strongly recovering, ARCOmadrid 2018 will consolidate its role as meeting place for collectors, dealers, curators and leading art world professionals from around the world, while special emphasis will be placed on new and cutting-edge works of art throughout the fair’s various sections and programs.
Maintaining the fair’s innovative recent direction, instead of the traditional guest nation ARCOmadrid 2018 will feature a guest concept—namely, “what is going to happen is not ‘the future’, but what we are going to do “, Rather than an exercise in mere speculation about the future of the art market, the goal of curators Chus Martínez, Elise Lammer and Rosa Lleó is to convert ARCOmadrid 2018 into “a space that might allow us to imagine, produce and propose a vision of the complexity that lies in wait for us.”
As Martínez—the Head of the Institute of Art at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel—explains:
“To propose a notion like ‘the future’ at the core of ARCOmadrid’s next edition demands to take seriously the question of continuity, about our collective responsibility not towards the new, but towards the million bridges that link the different artistic languages, the artistic generations, the institutional scales, the public and the private, the gendered and the political, the urban and the rural, the many natures and the human.”
Using this theme as a point of departure, the curators will select approximately 15 artists whose work will be displayed in a special section of the fair, designed by the acclaimed studio of architecture Andrés Jaque/Office for Political Innovation. The theme of “The Future” will also be the focus of the ARCOmadrid Forum, which this year will consist of an interdisciplinary seminar of leading international curators, critics, philosophers and scientists. In addition, ARCOmadrid will host numerous events for art world professionals, such as the Collecting Forum, sponsored by the Fundación Banco Santander and the Forum.
As has become a hallmark of the fair, ARCOmadrid 2018 will yet again take advantage of its unique position bridging the European and Latin American art worlds. The fair will offer a platform for Latin American art and its market by emphasizing the work of leading Latin American artists—including those based in other parts of the world—presented in stands of major Latin American galleries as well as in the fair’s curated programs such as Dialogues, curated by María de Corral, Lorena Martínez de Corral, and Catalina Lozano. Opening, curated by Stefanie Hessler and Ilaria Gianni.
Applications for ARCOmadrid 2018 General Programme are available on the fair’s website. The application deadline is July 3.
