Modern & Contemporary Art Exhibitions in Madrid

Albarrán Bourdais is pleased to announce Salvadoran artist Simón Vega’s first exhibition with the gallery. "Tiempos Cíclicos / Futuros Pasados", opening in September at the gallery’s Madrid space, brings together a new body of sculptures and installations that intertwine the monumental pre-Hispanic monoliths of Mesoamerica with contemporary forms of commemoration and propaganda. In the exhibition, the gallery presents a group of newly created works inspired by the towering stelae of Maya rulers and the massive hybrid animal sculptures—known as zoomorphs—found in the ancient city of Quiriguá, in present-day Guatemala. Through these works, Vega develops a non-linear narrative in which past and future, the primitive and the advanced, the indigenous and the foreign converge. Primarily propagandistic in function, these monuments were engraved to commemorate historical and ritual events—astronomical phenomena, symbols of power, and military conquests—that were understood to recur over time. According to these ancestral cultures, time does not unfold in a linear fashion but is cyclical: events repeat themselves throughout history. Indeed, the sophisticated and remarkably precise Maya calendar not only numerically organizes the passage of time but also identifies patterns in past events that make it possible, to some extent, to understand contemporary occurrences and anticipate future ones. "Tiempos Cíclicos / Futuros Pasados", reinterprets monuments of the past to reflect on contemporary worldviews and expressions of power. Emblems of global neoliberalism—such as smartphone icons and the FIFA logo—replace Maya hieroglyphs, proposing a new system of power that brings together knowledge, technology, entertainment, and social control. The exhibition presents new sculptures from the "Futuros Pasados" series, created with metal, found materials, lights, and living plants. Reinterpreting Maya and Mesoamerican monuments, such as the stelae of ancient rulers, the works create an ironic fusion of objects and symbols of power from different eras and cultures. Vega incorporates elements drawn from spaceships and futuristic robots from science fiction films and literature as references to contemporary autocrats and a techno-feudalist system. Meanwhile, "Tiempos Cíclicos / Futuros Pasados" features a sculpture inspired by the stone markers of the Mesoamerican ballgame and by a Mexica commemorative altar known as "La Piedra de Tizoc", which has been interpreted as part of a gladiatorial-style ritual combat. In this work, representations of cosmic and commemorative events intertwine with contemporary global sports culture—such as soccer and boxing—where political strategies, power relations, identity, and territory continue to be performed and contested. Vega’s sculptural landscape within the gallery expands through two new installations made primarily from wooden pallets, symbols of the standardization of trade and the transportation of goods. Following Maya tradition, the "Zoomorfo" represents a hybrid being in constant evolution, upon which life unfolds and which serves as a mediator between different planes of the world. A second installation evokes Mesoamerican funerary traditions and the close relationship between archaeology and cultural looting. Accompanied by a video animation, the installation further explores the cyclical conception of time held by the pre-Hispanic peoples of present-day Central America.

Colnaghi Madrid is pleased to announce its forthcoming exhibition The Danger of Beauty, in collaboration with and curated by Luis Berenguer which explores the shifting meanings and enduring influence of beauty across historic and contemporary art. Bringing contemporary works by Hamish Pearch, Cece Philips and Liu Bin into dialogue with paintings by El Greco, the Circle of Francisco de Zurbarán, Juan van der Hamen and Juan de Arellano, the exhibition considers beauty as a historically contingent idea, shaped by religious belief, social convention and structures of authority. Across European art, beauty has served as an expression of divine perfection, an outward sign of virtue and status, and a means through which material abundance might be both celebrated and possessed. Yet such images have always carried an awareness of impermanence: flowers wilt, food decays, bodies age and objects pass from one owner to another. The exhibition traces the survival and transformation of these concerns in contemporary practice, examining the relationships between beauty, desire, ownership and display. Pearch’s sculptural assemblages test the boundaries between the organic and the manufactured, placing materials in states of apparent instability, growth or deterioration. Philips draws upon portraiture, domestic painting, archival sources and memory to explore the politics of looking, constructing interiors in which intimacy, privacy and power remain unsettled. Liu Bin’s paintings similarly complicate the seductive qualities of the image, revealing beauty as a site of ambiguity rather than certainty.