ARCOmadrid 2026’s VIP Day Heat Check: Five Booths That Set the Fair’s Tone
ARCOmadrid’s VIP day rarely feels like a single moment — it’s more like a weather system. This year, the pressure front was unmistakable: brisk early sales, tightly edited presentations, and a fair floor where Latin American perspectives weren’t cordoned off as a “section,” but threaded through the main narrative.
That structure is by design. The fair’s director, Maribel López, has described ARCOmadrid’s longstanding emphasis on Latin America as “a geographical focus without being geographically binding,” a framing that continues to pull collectors from across the region while keeping Madrid’s fair legible to a broader international audience.
Across the halls, galleries reported buoyant energy on VIP day, with several booths drawing sustained attention for work that balanced material intelligence with conceptual bite. Here are five presentations that captured the fair’s temperature.
Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel
A standout moment came from Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander, whose quartet of paintings — executed in oil and oil stick — landed with a crisp, tactile immediacy. The group also functioned as a forward glance: the works preview Neuenschwander’s upcoming solo exhibition at the gallery’s São Paulo space next month. In the context of a fair, that kind of continuity matters, turning a booth from a salesroom into a chapter in an artist’s longer arc.
Gratin (Opening. New Galleries)
In the fair’s Opening. New Galleries sector — dedicated to 18 spaces operating for less than eight years — New York’s Gratin delivered the day’s clearest market signal. The gallery sold out its presentation of paintings by Max Jahn before VIP day ended, a result that underscored both the sector’s curatorial ambition and collectors’ appetite for tightly focused, emerging-program booths.
Sabrina Amrani
At Sabrina Amrani, the material story carried emotional weight. The booth included Josep Grau-Garriga’s “La llum i el temps” (1987), a work woven with the artist’s own garments — including a light blue sweater and a paint-marked smock — collapsing biography into textile structure. The piece’s sourcing adds another layer: Grau-Garriga drew materials from a Barcelona factory that once produced textiles for Pablo Picasso, a detail that quietly links personal history to industrial and art-historical lineage.
The booth also made room for contemporary unease. A work by Gohlke (2025) assembled silhouettes — including Donald Trump at a podium — clustering around skulls, cut from banknotes of the 35 richest countries by GDP. Placed amid the fair’s commerce, the gesture read as pointed rather than performative. “The security that we think we have when we have money is nothing compared to the fragility of the human being,” Gohlke said.
Meessen
Meessen’s presentation leaned into narrative fracture. Paintings by Belgian artist Robert Devriendt unfolded as a sequence of partial scenes — a roadway, hiking boots, a jacket, a woman glancing sideways, underwear left in the woods — distributed across multiple canvases like evidence pinned to a wall. The gallery’s director, Jean Meessen, emphasized the intervals as much as the images: “What I like is the void between each canvas,” he said, describing an atmosphere with a distinctly Lynchian undertow.
carlier | gebauer
At carlier | gebauer, a newly completed sculpture-fountain set a physical rhythm: water circulated and spilled onto the booth’s floor, turning the space into an environment rather than a display. The booth’s conceptual center of gravity, however, was a cabinet-like constellation of drawings that brought three distinct voices into conversation: previously unshown works from the 1960s by Spanish painter Luis Gordillo (now 91), ink drawings by Philip Guston made between 1950 and 1970, and new works on paper by Julie Mehretu dated 2025.
Nearby, the booth offered a compact preview of Ian Waelder’s forthcoming 2025 exhibition at Gesellschaft in Germany, alongside two restrained sculptures by Palestinian artist Nida Sinnokrot from 2022. Sinnokrot’s works gathered found materials — stone, rubble, a soccer ball, a football, and string — collected from the occupied territories, lending the objects a quiet gravity that resisted spectacle.
Taken together, these booths suggested an ARCOmadrid in confident form: commercially alert, materially adventurous, and increasingly fluent in the idea that “Latin America” is not a boundary on a map, but a set of conversations that can travel.
