All you need to know about contemporary art galleries in Madrid during the first month of 2019
This new year is loaded with new features in the Madrid art scene. Since the beginning of the year, Madrid warms up looking to one of the most relevant artistic events in contemporary art in Spain: ARCOmadrid 2019 (February 27 – March 3). The galleries present numerous exhibitions that seek to turn them into obligatory stops for professionals and art lovers who will meet during these dates.
In the absence of a month for its start, we made a compilation of the inaugurations that take place this month, many of which will last until March.

Leandro Navarro
Manolo Millares, En la mirada de Pierre Matisse
January 10 – February 15, 2019
The second individual exhibition of Manolo Millares in Leandro Navarro seeks to honor the figure of Pierre Matisse for the relevance that the relationship between both had in the career of the Spanish painter.

Marlborough Madrid
Luz sobre luz
January 10 – March 16, 2019
The exhibition brings together painting and sculpture by the kurdish artist Ahmet Günestekin. His work is substained in a creative universe around his cultural heritage. The art pieces stand out for their use of color with handmade dyes where motifs such as tentacles or skulls are present. It has a strong influence of the Mediterranean, Anatolian and Mesopotamian cultures.

Twin Gallery
All cars are painted in assembly lines
January 10 – 23 February, 2019
Paula García-Masedo presents an individual exhibition where the car is the protagonist. This motor vehicle serves as a means to reflect on the ways of production and consumption. García-Masedo uses the automotive painting as the focus of her research in order to make this art show.

Utopia Parkway
Ciudad Terminal
January 11 – March 8, 2019
Adamo Dimitriadis, a Madrid-born artist of Greek descent, reflects on the contemporary city by dealing with current issues such as the delusion of security or the paradox between the overpopulation and loneliness of its inhabitants.

Lucía Mendoza
Pareidolia
January 12 – March 16, 2019
Pareidolia describes a vague and random stimulus usually represented by an image that is sensed in a recognizable way. Oliver Czarnetta applies the same mechanism used in the search for concrete shapes in the silhouettes of nature to put before the viewer artworks where active observation is defining to endow them with meaning.

Marta Moriarty
Art Window
January 12 – February 25, 2019
“Les copains de Cotonou” is an artwork with series of ceramic pseudo heads that serves as the starting point for José Luis Vicario’s exhibition. This art piece shows the recurring themes of his work (beauty, sex, museography, breaking orders, uprising of the look …). With clear influences from African culture, especially the culture of Benin and its bronzes, this art show, initially scheduled in 2003, at last takes place.

Sabrina Amrani
Watch before you fall
January 12 – March 30, 2019
Manal AlDowayan works in multiple mediums and large-scale installations to address the invisibility and status of women in Saudi Arabia. In this exhibition, AlDowayan observes the symbolism in books written about women’s bodies in order to fragment them later and reconstructs them in new artistic ways conceived as healing totems that alter perceptions and correct memory.

Blanca Berlín
Los unicornios existen
January 17 – March 9, 2019
Isabel Muñoz was invited to participate in the Planche (s) Contact 2018 Festival with the task to carry out a project on the French city of Deauville. Muñoz decided to do a project that, with the sea as a stage, connects the ethereal with the corporeal, the mythical creature with the beast, the spiritual with the sensual, and the unreal with the earthly. Thus, the artist reflects the relationship of the human being and the horse, honouring the Norman equestrian race and investigating once again the origins of our human linage.

Fernández-Braso
Autorretratos
January 17 – February 9, 2019
This is the first of the two exhibitions that the gallery dedicates to the painter Alfredo Alcaín. This first one is dedicated to his self-portraits. The audience will find a total of twenty-seven works which the artist began painting in 1954 coinciding with his entry into the School of Fine Arts of San Fernando.

Cámara Oscura
Faces
January 17 – March 16, 2019
Photographic portrait collective exhibition focused on the face to analyze three complementary strands: the relationship between the primitive photography of the XIX century and the contemporary one, the binomial document-story and the contrast between the portrait and the self-portrait. The audience will be able to contemplate the gaze of the contemporary artists Joan Fontcubierta, Roger Ballen, Jamie Baldrige, Elina Brotherus and Ellen Kooi.

Elvira González
Vida de Pulpo
January 19 – March 30, 2019
Vida de pulpo is the title chosen by Miquel Barceló for this exhibition that alludes to the link of the artist with the sea and with the relationship of the human being with its waters. A romantic and devastating vision that highlights a disturbing and stormy sea that seems to foresee the moment in which we live. Paintings where boats with humans and some empty boats are in the middle of the sea and a large multicolored two-meter octopus that presides over one of the exhibition rooms shape this art show.

Travesía Cuatro
The end of the world
January 25 – March 23, 2019
In 2016 Elena del Rivero won the Joan Mitchell prize and the following year a residency at the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New Orleans. The project she proposed was related to her work CHANT and the destruction of September 11, 2001, in wich she was investigating the trauma and recovery of the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina. There she met guide Rob Mohammed, who later also took her out of New Orleans to a place that residents call The End of the World, an area of marshes at the mouth of the Mississippi where the land dissolves into the ocean. This place and her experiences there have inspired this exhibition.

Ponce + Robles
Grafiando Datos
January 26 – February 08, 2019
Extension of the MAFD project: Mapping Active Fire Data by Esther Pizarro, recently presented at La Fragua (Tabacalera Promoción de Arte). In it, the artist investigates around the forest fires of the last decade embodied in the form of dynamic and interactive cartographic visualizations.

Puxa Gallery
Introspección y fuga
January 31 – March 30, 2019
Mar Solís joins the Puxagallery team with a solo exhibition conceived as a site-specific where she displays large drawings and a unique linden wood sculptural series. This is an interdisciplinary project where Solís experiments with the line and its multiple fluctuations to generate a symbiosis between space and matter.
On Portugal’s part, some galleries from Lisboa have started the year presenting exhibitions with the latest works of their artists. Of these galleries, we highlight:

3 + 1 Contemporanea
Manglar
January 18 – March 9, 2019
This is the first individual exhibition of Juan Tessi in Portugal. The artist presents drawings, vases and paintings that make up El Manglar. The works also let the audience appreciate the main theme of Tessi’s work: the observation of the body understood as a sum of elements that make up a figure.

Filomena Soares
Sexo, Escondidas e uma Parede
January 24 2019
Exhibition curated by Isabel Carlos that shows the most recent work of Rodrigo Oliveira in his sixth solo exhibition in the gallery.
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