Contemporary Art in Madrid [Part 3 of 3: Calle Orfila and Elsewhere]

Juan José Aquerreta, Últimamente [installation view], at Galería Marlborough. Photo: 16 Miles.   [more]


Juan José Aquerreta, Últimamente [installation view], at Galería Marlborough.  Photo: 16 Miles.   [more]

Just north of the Prado, tucked away just off the Calle de Génova, a main thoroughfare through Madrid, sits Calle Orfila, home to more galleries on a single block than probably any other in the city.  Below are three of our favorites, followed by an obligatory, inadequate reference to the Reina Sofía.

Galería Marlborough
Orfila, 5
The Marlborough empire stretches into Madrid, focusing here on Spanish artists.  Juan José Aquerreta paintings - elegant little still lifes that suggest Morandi if he had decided to paint bright, glimmering fruit and rich, dark pottery - were on display on our visit.  The gallery itself is large and airy space; well worth a visit.  


Erik Schmidt, Recurrent Morning Manliness, 2009, at Galería Soledad Lorenzo. Photo: 16 Miles.   [more]

Galería Soledad Lorenzo
Orfila, 5
Soledad Lorenzo sits right next door to Marlborough and shares its address.  Though equally ambitious (they represent Catalan superstar Antoni Tàpies), their program veers toward the more adventurous, having worked with Tony Oursler, Jennifer Steinkamp, and Robert Longo.  Having just seen a show of Erik Schmidt's impastoed canvases at Elizabeth Dee a few months ago, walking in to find more of his work on a random street in Madrid was a particular uncanny experience.  He handles his thick, heavy paint so lightly it could be meringue.  The title of his work above is a winner.

Galería Cayón
Ofila, 10
Galería Cayón largely focuses on secondary market work, but they feature that choice material, usually grounded in minimalism and international, in frequent group shows.  


Leandro Erlich, The Tower, 2008, at the Reina Sofía. Photo: 16 Miles.   [more]

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Santa Isabel, 52
Spain's national museum could comfortably curate its permanent collection throughout its enormous series of buildings (or just store away everything but Guernica) and still be one of the world's best, most-visited art museums.  It turns out that the staff does a great job with their collection but also finds time to tackle major contemporary projects.  Paul Thek, who still so absurdly marginalized in American museums (though his work regularly on display at the Walker is one of the first works of art I remember seeing as a kid), gets a major retrospective in one gallery, Richard Serra dominates another with a permanent installation.  A tower of mirrors (brutally underserved by my photographs) built by Leandro Erlich (responsible for the faux-swimming pool at P.S.1 at the moment) and videos by Alia Syed rounded out the pretty remarkable selection of artists.

Roy Lichtenstein, Brushstroke, 1996, at the Reina Sofía. Photo: 16 Miles.   [more]

[Top 10 of 2008] #5 - Schweiz über alles at La Fundación/Colección Jumex

Entrance to the Colección Jumex.

Colección Jumex is located within the factory of the eponymous juice company, a bunker on the edge of Mexico City, accessible only by taxi. Before sliding open the metal walls blocking the entrance, security guards question you and check your identity.  It's open only via appointment and walled off from the congested streets of the DF.  To put it another way: it would be hard to imagine a white box purer than this.  (In our two-hour stay, we saw only two other visitors.)

Ugo Rondinone, Love Invents Us, 1999, neon, Perspex, transluscent film, aluminum, 310 x 721 x 10 cm.

Above the concrete block walls, a Rondinone sign.  Within the walls of corporate Mexico on top of La Fundación Jumex's storage facility, its admixture of sincerity and irony had never seemed so perfect.


Clever, adorable labels with little icons identify each work.

It was a smart presentation of pleasurable favorites with a needlessly incendiary title. Focusing solely on the Swiss artists in the collection, it presented a simple thesis well: the days of nationalist art are long over, washed away by an entrenched globalism, at least within the art markets of Chelsea, Berlin, and London.


Front: Urs Fischer, Addict, 2006, mixed media.
Back: Ugo Rondinone, Where Do We Go from Here?, 1996, ink on wall, playwood, yellow neon, 4 DVDs, 4 projections, 500 x 1200 x 1000 cm.


Pipilotti Rist, Ever Is Over All, 1997, video installation, dimensions variable.

Any exhibition that features Pipilotti Rist's video of a Dorothy-figure wandering down the street, smashing car windows, and smiling to police officers will instantly earn my affection, but there were other charms as well: little icons identifying the art on display and an installation in the offices upstairs by a Mexican artist named Moris, which required you to climb a ladder and jump a wall, dodging barbed wire.  Containing tabloids filled with stories of gang violence and organized crime, it injected the reality outside the pristine walls into the center of the collection.


Moris, Hermoso paisaje No. 5 (el baldio), 2008, installation.


Free, delicious Jumex beverages are available for all visitors.

The real joy, admittedly, had to do with the exclusivity of the affair, viewing art that only a few are likely to see in an environment that - however ridiculous, elitist, and cloistered - would be hard to improve upon.  The young employees were tinkering happily with a recently-acquired video work; there were free drinks (Jumex-brand, clearly), a gargantuan research library (in which sat a full set of Artforums, their bindings seductively cascading along the shelves), and a seemingly limitless supply of art (attested to by the stacks of burgundy, catalogue binders filling the offices).