Galerie Krinzinger's booth at ARCOmadrid 2025.
Attracting nearly 100,000 international, national, and local art admirers—including the King and Queen of Spain, who attended the opening ceremony—the 44th edition of ARCOmadrid featured 214 galleries from 30 countries March 5th to 9th at the IFEMA MADRID.
A visually exciting art fair showcasing discoveries from Spain, Portugal, and Latin America alongside familiar works by established international artists, it attracted curators, critics, and collectors from around the world for its booth presentations, programming, and special exhibitions during the first two professional days, before opening its doors to the general public for the remainder of the engaging event.
“The objective of the fair is simple,” ARCOmadrid director Maribel López told Art & Object, “to bring Spanish artists to the international market and international art to the collectors and institutions here.”
Click through to discover our favorite artists and artworks from this year’s inspiring fair.
Widely known in Europe for his paintings and drawings that deftly combine representation and abstraction, linear draftsmanship, vibrant coloration, and gesturalism, Secundino Hernández is one of Spain’s most internationally exhibited contemporary artists. With the first solo institutional show of the Madrid painter in his hometown at Sala Alcalá 31, which surveys his almost 30-year artistic career, the gallery presented two recent paintings at the fair, including this untitled abstraction of vertically stitched strips of linen canvas tinted with acrylic and dye. By scraping and eradicating the paint and dye with a heavy-duty pressure washer, he creates an uncanny mosaic of brilliant colors and shifting forms that keeps the eye in motion while expressively stimulating the viewer’s mind.
Image: Secundino Hernández, Untitled, 2024. Stitching, acrylic and dye on linen 195 x 320 x 4 cm.
In constructing imaginary worlds across cinema, painting, sculpture, and new media, Laurent Grasso draws on both the past and present to envision the future. Based between Paris and New York, the multidisciplinary Marcel Duchamp Prize-winning artist elevates the intersection of science and artistic exploration by merging realistic imagery with supernatural phenomena.
With a newly opened exhibition at the gallery’s Madrid space, Grasso presented three paintings from his enigmatic Studies into the Past series, inspired by Frederic Edwin Church's Hudson River paintings, at the fair. The painting reproduced here depicts an enchanting South American landscape from a seemingly distant past, illuminated mysteriously by an aurora borealis—a phenomenon with a peculiar twist, as it can only occur in the upper reaches of the Northern Hemisphere.
Image: Laurent Grasso, Studies into the Past, 2025. Oil on wood, 70 x 100 cm.
A Polish artist born in Warsaw, where he continues to live and work, Pawel Althamer is best known for his sculptures, installations, and performances involving community engagement, collaboration, and social transformation. In 2007, he created a nearly 70-foot-long inflated nude self-portrait, Balloon, in a park in Milan, Italy that had to be protected by the police from the outraged locals who demanded its removal. He initiated Draftsmen’s Congress for 2012’s Berlin Biennale, where people completely graffitied the inserted walls and floor of an historic city church.
Continuing to incorporate family and friends into his art projects, Althamer created life-size busts of his daughters for his presentation at the fair. Jael is shown relishing chocolate, depicted with it running down her chin, while Marianna is captured in a contemplative pose within a vase-like form, where flowers could brighten her mood.
Image: Pawel Althamer, Marianna, 2025. Glazed ceramic, 66 x 43 x 35 cm.
An Argentinian conceptual artist who often made works protesting his country’s government, the imperialist West, and the Catholic Church, León Ferrari once said, “Art will be neither beauty nor novelty; art will be efficacy and agitation.” That same year, 1965, he courted controversy by creating a life-size sculpture of Christ crucified on an American fighter jet instead of a cross.
Presenting a solo booth show of Ferrari’s provocative collages and sculptural assemblages from 1986 to 2000, the gallery showcased a clever blend of the artist’s religious and political pieces. However, it was collages from the Relecturas de la Biblia [Rereadings of the Bible] series by the Venice Biennale Golden Lion-winning artist, who passed away in 2013 at the age of 92, that captured and held our attention with its cut-and-pasted scenes of sex, death, war, and piety, which poetically question the values of accepted Western ideals.
Image: León Ferrari, Sem título, da série Relectura de la Biblia (Untitled, from the Relectura de la Biblia series), 1986. Collage on photo print on paper. [Unframed]: 26.5 x 23.5 cm/10 1/2 x 9 1/2 in. Framed: 53.5 x 44.5 cm/21 x 17 1/2 in.
Celebrated for her surreal sculptures, drawings, and videos that blend nature’s life forms with corporeal concerns, Teresa Solar Abboud's claw-like sculptures and related drawings were among the highlights of Cecilia Alemani’s Venice Biennale exhibition in 2022. A new sculpture from the Madrid-based Spanish artist’s series of zoomorphic shapes, inspired by animals and prehistoric life forms, is currently on view in a commission for New York’s High Line, where Alemani is the director and chief curator of High Line Art.
With a simultaneous solo show of the artist’s work at its Mexico City location, the gallery featured a salon hanging of her imaginative drawings on the back wall of its booth. Offering more than a dozen watercolor and ink visualizations of colorfully arresting anatomical shapes, drawings like Oozing out caught our eye while taking our thoughts on a rollercoaster ride through time.
Image: Teresa Solar Abboud, Oozing out, 2025. Watercolor and ink on paper, 51 x 76 cm.
An Argentinian artist, curator, activist, poet, and writer, Fernanda Laguna is an inspirational figure in Buenos Aires' creative community. While running various project spaces in the early 2000s, including one that still operates as a publishing house, she participated in actions and protests linked to the Latin American feminist collective Ni Una Menos (Not One Woman Less). Simultaneously, she created drawings, paintings, installations, and actions that fused art history, pop culture, and social concerns with craft.
The subject of a solo show at The Drawing Center in New York in 2022, Laguna’s recent paintings were exhibited in the gallery’s booth alongside two other influential Argentinian artists, Claudia Fontes and Juan Tessi. She stood out with a collection of dreamlike canvases featuring black, cactus-like anthropomorphic figures in sunset scenarios, overlaid with painted and cut-out geometric shapes and whimsical elements that introduced a touch of romance to the mix.
Image: Fernanda Laguna, Corazón perdido (Lost heart), 2024. Acrylic on canvas with cut-outs, 75 x 64 cm | 29.5 x 25.2 in.
A Puerto Rican artist based in Berlin, Chaveli Sifre creates installations, scents, paintings, and performative rituals focused on healing practices, the sense of smell, botany, and the belief systems constructed around them. Presenting a one-person exhibition in the gallery’s booth in the Profiles | Latin American Art section of the fair, Sifre offered a selection of paintings and sculptures related to magical thinking. A cut aluminum spiral featuring quartz and selenite stones (one shaped like a crescent moon and another resembling a medicine capsule), the cast hands of a soothsayer, and decorative ceramic scent bottles conveyed a sense of shamanism taking place.
Meanwhile, several paintings depicting ritualistic practices, such as the otherworldly hand grasping a sparkling cocktail in her Fuente (Fountain) canvas, made the booth a go-to spot for a moment of psychic healing in a vibrant corner of the bubbling art fair.
Image: Chaveli Sifre, Fuente (Fountain), 2025. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 40 x 30 cm (15.5 x 12 in).
Gaining notice as a ceramicist while still in secondary school, Francisco Trêpa earned a BFA in Sculpture in 2017 and an MFA in Multimedia Art in 2022, both from the Lisbon Academy of Fine Arts. The award-winning Lisbon-based artist further developed his imaginative ceramic practice in artist residencies, group shows, and one-person institutional exhibitions across Portugal before landing a solo show and representation with Galeria Foco in 2024. Ceramic sculptures related to that 2024 exhibition, Flor Cadáver (Corpse Flower), were on view in the emerging artist’s one-person presentation at the gallery’s booth.
An exploration of pollinators and their importance in the survival of planetary life, his abstract and semi-figurative sculptures were centered around the Rafflesia, a Southeast Asian flower that emits an unpleasant odor, similar to a decomposing body, which attracts pollinating insects. Constructing a symbolic sci-fi scenario, Trêpa sets the stage for a cross-pollinated world of the future, where lifeforms are surreally shaped through the marriage of nature and technology.
Image: Francisco Trêpa, Polinizador Cansado (Tired Pollinator), 2024. Glazed Ceramics, 27 x 32 x 30 cm.
Widely known in Europe for his paintings and drawings that deftly combine representation and abstraction, linear draftsmanship, vibrant coloration, and gesturalism, Secundino Hernández is one of Spain’s most internationally exhibited contemporary artists. With the first solo institutional show of the Madrid painter in his hometown at Sala Alcalá 31, which surveys his almost 30-year artistic career, the gallery presented two recent paintings at the fair, including this untitled abstraction of vertically stitched strips of linen canvas tinted with acrylic and dye. By scraping and eradicating the paint and dye with a heavy-duty pressure washer, he creates an uncanny mosaic of brilliant colors and shifting forms that keeps the eye in motion while expressively stimulating the viewer’s mind.
Image: Secundino Hernández, Untitled, 2024. Stitching, acrylic and dye on linen 195 x 320 x 4 cm.
In constructing imaginary worlds across cinema, painting, sculpture, and new media, Laurent Grasso draws on both the past and present to envision the future. Based between Paris and New York, the multidisciplinary Marcel Duchamp Prize-winning artist elevates the intersection of science and artistic exploration by merging realistic imagery with supernatural phenomena.
With a newly opened exhibition at the gallery’s Madrid space, Grasso presented three paintings from his enigmatic Studies into the Past series, inspired by Frederic Edwin Church's Hudson River paintings, at the fair. The painting reproduced here depicts an enchanting South American landscape from a seemingly distant past, illuminated mysteriously by an aurora borealis—a phenomenon with a peculiar twist, as it can only occur in the upper reaches of the Northern Hemisphere.
Image: Laurent Grasso, Studies into the Past, 2025. Oil on wood, 70 x 100 cm.
Paul Laster
Paul Laster is a writer, editor, curator, advisor, artist, and lecturer. New York Desk Editor for ArtAsiaPacific, Laster is also a Contributing Editor at Raw Vision and Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art and a contributing writer for Art & Object, Ocula, Galerie, Artsy, Sculpture, Time Out New York, Conceptual Fine Arts, and Two Coats of Paint. Formerly the Founding Editor of Artkrush, he began The Daily Beast’s art section and was Art Editor at Russell Simmons’ OneWorld Magazine. Laster has also been the Curatorial Advisor for Intersect Art & Design and an Adjunct Curator at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, now MoMA PS1.
