Many kilometers above our heads, planes fly through the sky loaded with Picassos going to or returning from one of the exhibitions organized in different parts of the world on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of his death. So here at Arco, the contemporary art fair in Madrid that the King and Queen inaugurate today, visitors have to make do with his corpse, courtesy of the artist Eugenio Merino who has installed his burning chapel at the ADN gallery stand. He sells it for 45,000 euros and is one of the main sources of attraction for selfie addicts: the sure trick to succeed on Instagram. “There is no one who can find a Picasso at the moment. He is the backbone of the art market, but right now there is not much work for sale, ”says the gallery owner Leandro Navarro, and Marc Domenech confirms that, indeed, the works of the man from Malaga must be traveling.
On its first day of open doors for professionals, Arco is the closest thing to how the art world looked and felt before the pandemic and the crisis caused by the war. The halls are filled with the excitement of the best of times, and only the Ukrainian Voloshyn Gallery, which served as a refuge for artists and their families during the war, seems capable of bringing us back to earth. Like those fields of black earth carved with human figures with which the artist Nikita Kadanas speaks of the impossibility of erasing the corpses that are partially covered in battlefields. Sometimes the words are necessary: Stop Putin, Decolonize Russia, Gas embargo Russia or, like this, in capital letters so that nobody can pretend that they have not seen it, FUCK WAR .
For many, the fucking war began a year ago precisely here, in halls 7 and 9 of Ifema, when what until then seemed like a party ended up parking many sales until better times arrived. And the return to normality -if a fair has something normal about it- has left political art behind, which in its last edition even managed to resurrect an omnipresent Franco. In any case, in this Arch that has managed to bring together 121 galleries from 36 countries, war seems like things for women. While the voice of Niño de Elche ("buy me", "buy me", "buy me") sounds thunderous through the loudspeakers, acting as the preacher of The Mediterranean: A Round Sea, the special section of this 42nd edition, women with round stickers circulate that contain 7%, the figure that the Ministry allocated to the acquisition of works made by women artists.
But it is in the stands where they show their most combative face. Like the Mexican Teresa Margolles, who turns one of those glamorous dresses that young women wear in beauty pageants in her country and that explodes in your face when you discover that the jewels she wears on one of her sleeves are actually pieces of glass broken pieces that the artist collected in Culiacán after a shooting that was trying to capture Ovidio Guzmán López, son of the drug lord El Chapo.
Art history is also a good battlefield. The French artist Orlan shows in Rocío Santa Cruz two series of violent digital collages based on portraits that Picasso made of Jacqueline Roque and Dora Maar whose title speaks for itself: Crying women are angry. Diana Larrea questions in Espacio Mínimo the attributions of a series of paintings from the Museo del Prado collections that for centuries were thought to have been painted by women and in the 20th century their authorship was changed to that of a man. This is the case of Woman with Magpie and Dove, which entered the royal collections like Artemisia Gentileschi and is now attributed to the Cecco, Caravaggio's enigmatic assistant. Or the Girl with a Rose by Guido Reni that had always been by Elisabetta Sirani. And María María Acha-Kutscher, in La Rabbia di Proserpina (DNA gallery), takes out of context and focuses on the faces of protagonists of baroque paintings that we do not know if they were victims or perpetrators of violence.
It is still early to talk about results, the fair closes its doors on Sunday (although most of them come bought from home), but the smiles of the gallery owners make us think that joy has returned in the form of checks of several zeros. Carreras Múgica does not lose hope of selling the imposing sculpture by Chillida, which at the moment seems to be the most expensive piece at the fair (3,600,000 euros), followed by another work by the Basque sculptor in Guillermo de Osma (2,400,000). , a Lucio Fontana that exceeds 2,000,000 euros in Cayón or the burlap by Miró Femme et oiseaux in Mayoral, also for two million. Next to her, two monumental pieces by the young Catalan Marria Pratts in a state of grace. "In Arco there are collectors of all kinds and that is the best thing about this fair," they point out from Lelong. "Here you can find young collectors who can buy for relatively little money and it makes them happy. In Basel or other mega-fairs, works of 4o, 50 million euros are sold. But from a certain number there is no gratification anymore because it is not about art but investment, pure finance".
