ARCO Madrid Highlights
One of the only art fairs to happen in the first half of 2020, before the Covid-19 winter dawns onto Europe. For those of you who don’t follow the LATAM focused art scene, ARCO Madrid art fair just happened. Below are our snapshots and visuals of our standout artists and booths. Including our friends from Bucharest, Suprainfinit - who won the best booth award ‘Premio Opening' - with an outstanding solo show of Vlad Nuncā, in the section curated by Tiago de Abreu Pinto and Övül Ö Durmusoglu.
As Maria Lopez the co-director of ARCOmadrid art fair told us, the concentration of this year art fair boasts 70% international galleries and the picture certainly showed this. As expected you see mostly Spanish speaking galleries - galleries from South and Central America taking advantage of the language to bridge their programmes, connecting with European collectors. For us however, a gallery that stood out of the crowd, that wasn’t your typical LATAM / Spanish programme, nor one seen at ARCOmadrid before was, Mariane Ibrahim Gallery from Chicago - Whose booth shown threw with works by Peter Uka among Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze, Mwangi Hutter, Ayana V. Jackson, Clotilde Jiménez and Lina Iris Viktor - pictured below.
Mariane Ibrahim is a exemplary model of an art dealer that has created her own market, focused her curatorial programme on one core vision. As she explained to the editorial team at Artsy in a recent interview;
“My ambition is to retrieve as many narratives of the post-Black era”
Mariane Ibrahim Gallery at ARCOmadrid
Today we are highlight the works by artist Peter Uka.
Nigerian, born 1975 and based in Cologne, Germany. Peter Uka studied under Tal R and Eberhard Havekost at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. His practice explores the formative moments in people's lives. He produces figurative paintings, which stories makes us think about the historical precedents of globalisation and the difference between cultural queues connecting us to places. For Uka, places he calls home. Making us acknowledge the value of ‘collective reciprocity’, the idea of humanity working together, to build deeper connections and true community.
Artworks and artists featured in this article include:
Christto & Andrew - Computers in Control, 2018
Marco Godoy - In the Service of Vision, 2020
Gonzalo Elvira - La historieta… 2017
Chema López - Doler Es, 2019
Peter Uka - Quiet Listening, 2020
Vlad Nuncā - Time Travel, 2019
Túlio Pinto - Náutica #1, 2019
Aurèlia Muñoz - Forma en la naturaleza, 1971
Cian Dayrit - This is not an Atlas, 2019
Carlos Aires - Telediario, 2019