I’ve spent a good chunk of my adult life living in Spain. Enough time that walking into ARCOmadrid feels less like visiting a foreign institution and more like a reunion with a familiar community of artists. Madrid was my introduction to this country when I first came here from Canada, and it’s a city I return to with real affection.
There’s a particular energy here during fair week: the art world descends, the restaurants fill up, and IFEMA’s spaces transform into what the fair’s own architecture brief called ‘an ephemeral metropolis’; a city that exists for five days, built entirely out of art and conversation.
ARCOmadrid 2026 at a Glance
Now in its 45th edition, ARCOmadrid brought together 211 galleries from 30 countries and over 1,300 artists. Works spanning painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video, new media, and things that cheerfully resist categorization.
I arrived on behalf of Format, tasked with gaining insight into one of Europe’s most important contemporary art fairs. What I found there was a fair that is genuinely asking big questions about the future of art, the history of painting, and what it means to make something in 2026 that you hope will still matter in 2045.
Key takeaways from ARCOmadrid 2026:
- Theme: ARCO2045: The Future, For Now explored how artists respond to uncertainty in the present.
- Throughline: many booths engaged directly with art history (playfully, not reverently.)
- Standouts: a mix of returning favorites and new painterly discoveries.
- Identity marker: ARCO’s strong Europe–Latin America bridge remains distinctive.
- Market note: acquisitions were strong, but Spain’s 21% art VAT remains a pressure point.
ARCO2045: “The Future, For Now”
The central theme of this 45th edition was ARCO2045: The Future, For Now, a curated section developed by José Luis Blondet and Malagí Arriola that invited galleries and artists to imagine what art might look like two decades from now. Not as a crystal ball exercise, but as something more provisional and honest: a reflection on what languages art is developing today, in response to a present that feels genuinely uncertain.
The section’s dedicated gallery space, designed by Estudio Angela Juarranz as a structure that “does not illustrate time but unfolds it,” was one of the most atmospheric rooms at the fair.
Standout works from ARCO2045
Works played on déjà vu, memory, and prophecy. Paulina Olowska’s work considers representation in fashion photography. Candice Lin offered a vibrantly bleak picture of what’s to come, if such a juxtaposition were possible. As a painter, I’m always interested in the question of what a medium can carry and what it can say that another can’t; ARCO2045 felt like a section full of artists wrestling seriously with exactly that.
At Format, we think a lot about the future of how artists present their work digitally. There’s something energizing about being surrounded by artists asking the same underlying question from a completely different direction: what does the work of tomorrow actually look like, and how do we make space for it today?
Candice Lin’s “Family Dinner,” shown with François Ghebaly, was one that has stayed with me. Lin is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist whose work has shown at the Venice Biennale and Whitechapel Gallery, and whose practice consistently finds ways to make deeply uncomfortable ideas feel inhabited. Family Dinner is a dark take on the future, and it knows it. What I appreciated was the humour running underneath it, which is very much Lin’s signature: the work doesn’t ask you to despair, just to look clearly.
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When Contemporary Art Talks to the Past
If the official theme of the fair was the future, one of the things I kept noticing on the floor was something closer to the opposite: how many artists were in direct, playful conversation with art history. Not reverently, not with the kind of deadpan irony that can sometimes feel hollow, but with the genuine pleasure of someone who loves the tradition they’re riffing on.
Christian Jankowski and “Neue Malerei—Picasso”
Christian Jankowski’s Neue Malerei—Picasso series was a perfect example. Jankowski has been developing this body of work since around 2015, finding digital photographs of people reenacting paintings by masters like Picasso, Van Gogh, Magritte and sending those photographs to painting replicators in China, then exhibiting the results. The conceptual layers are genuinely interesting: questions of authorship, originality, and what it means to ‘paint like’ anyone in an age of infinite reproduction. The work is funny and uncomfortable in equal measure.
Thomas Hirschhorn’s Art-History-Plaque Series
Thomas Hirschhorn‘s Art-History-Plaque XXV , shown with Galerie Chantal Crousel, belongs to this same thread but arrives at it from a completely different direction. Hirschhorn is a Swiss artist who has built his entire practice around the deliberate use of humble, disposable materials like cardboard, packing tape, and aluminium foil. The materials double as a kind of political statement about access, value, and who art is for.
The Art-History-Plaque series brings that sensibility directly into dialogue with the canon: art historical images printed and annotated on cardboard, large-scale and emphatically hand-made. The effect is irreverent without being dismissive. If anything, the rawness of the material seems to argue that the history of art belongs to everyone, not just to institutions with the budget to handle it reverently. It’s a generous work, and a quietly radical one.
Alberto Baraya’s Archival Collisions
And then there was Alberto Baraya’s Niños cogiendo fruta y cazador torero sobre Ferrari 330 GT 2+2 (1969) at Galería Fernando Pradilla—a title so wonderfully specific it almost functions as a work in itself. Baraya is a Colombian artist whose practice interrogates colonial legacies and the systems through which we classify and consume culture. The iconographic collision of children picking fruit, a bullfighting hunter, a very specific Ferrari from 1969 is deliberately destabilizing. It’s the kind of work that stays with you not because you fully understand it, but because it won’t let you stop trying.
ARYZ’s Preludio and the Case for Painting Now
ARYZ (Octavi Arrizabalaga) at Galeria Senda was perhaps the work in this category that moved me most. His Preludio series presents large-format oil paintings conceived as visual dialogues with the great masters of classical painting. It’s a tribute, in his own words, to the painter’s craft as a legitimate means of expression and cultural transmission. There is still, in some corners of the art world, a faint suspicion of painting’s directness and physicality. ARYZ’s Preludio doesn’t argue for painting. It just is, magnificently.
Old Favorites and New Discoveries
One of my favourite things about a fair at this scale is the combination of running into work you already love and stumbling across artists you didn’t know you were looking for.
Elga Heinzen and Laura Garcia Karras (a Booth Worth Lingering In)
Elga Heinzen was a genuine pleasure to encounter again, shown here in direct dialogue with the work of Laura Garcia Karras presso il Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou booth—a pairing that turned out to be one of the most talked-about at the fair. The combination was genuinely inspired: Heinzen’s quietly powerful abstract forms from the 1970s alongside Garcia Karras’s large, hypnotic floral paintings. Garcia Karras’s work seduces you with chromatic intensity before you notice the underlying strangeness; Heinzen’s earns your attention through a different kind of patience. Together they made for a booth worth lingering in.
New Painters to Watch: Travis Macdonald and Antonio Montalvo
Among my new discoveries, Travis Macdonald stopped me completely. There’s something in the way he handles paint that feels immediately distinctive. He is one of those artists where you look at a work and think: I can learn a ton from this person. Antonio Montalvo was another find: a practice that balances formal rigour with real emotional presence. Both of these painters create a kind of luminosity that I’ll be thinking about within my own practice.
Latin American Galleries at ARCOmadrid
The diversity of work on show was inspiring. Over 30% of the international galleries came from Latin America, a dimension of ARCO that makes it unlike any other European fair, and one of the things I love most about it. The Profiles | Latin American Art section, curated by José Esparza Chong Cuy, presented single-artist proposals from 11 creators.
Gabriel Branco
Gabriel Branco’s debut with Galatea was a highlight: the young São Paulo-born artist brought together photography and oil and beeswax paintings rooted in the everyday life of the city’s periphery, baile funk, street commerce, popular architecture, rendered in luminous chromatic glazes that suspend your gaze.
Harold Mendez
Harold Mendez, shown with Patron Gallery e Commonwealth and Council, brought a different kind of weight: his practice sits at the intersection of memory, materiality, and what history leaves behind in objects. It’s a curatorial structure of one artist, one proposal demands you slow down and actually look, rather than scanning across a booth of twenty works.
El Apartamento Booth Highlights
El Apartamento was another booth I didn’t want to leave. The Havana-founded gallery, which now also has a home in Madrid, has built its identity around the most incisive proposals in Cuban and Spanish art, and at ARCO that dual focus was on full display.
Ariel Cabrera Montejo‘s paintings are a genuinely original thing: working from Cuban historical archives, he takes the official heroes of Cuban independence and puts them back in their bodies, creating something sensual, ironic, human, and nothing like their “official” portraits. The technique is steeped in the Spanish and Italian academic tradition, which creates a wonderful tension with how subversive the actual content is.
Los Bravú—the duo of Dea Gómez and Diego Omil—operate in adjacent territory: their figurative work blends neo-Mannerist virtuosity with surrealist fantasy, comics, collage, and the textures of urban and vernacular culture. Their painting En la grieta brilla el deseo (2025) won the Community of Madrid’s ARCO 2026 prize and will enter the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo collection.
Nacho Martín Silva—the Madrid-based painter whose practice treats the studio as a kind of archive with images and attempts accumulating over time until they find their moment, their meaning arriving late. There is something very relatable about that philosophy, and his work at the booth carried exactly that quality: considered, layered, unhurried. A booth that felt like one of the most alive at the fair.
Red Dots, Institutional Buying, and Spain’s 21% Art VAT
There were a lot of red dots throughout the fair. Institutional acquisitions were announced from the Museo Reina Sofía, IVAM, the Community of Madrid, the Andalusian Regional Government, and multiple private foundations.
What Sold and Why it Matters
The Reina Sofía alone invested over 400,000 euros in 17 works by 14 artists—nine of them women. For anyone who pays attention to the health of the contemporary art ecosystem, this is meaningful: major institutions buying from living artists, at a fair, in public, is an affirmation of the entire chain from studio to collection.
The VAT Tension (Context and What Galleries Were Asking For)
It’s worth noting that this edition of ARCOmadrid took place amid real tension within Spain’s art sector. Having lived and exhibited here, this isn’t abstract to me. Spanish galleries have been vocal about the country’s 21% VAT on art purchases. It’s the highest in Europe, compared to 5–8% in France, Italy, Germany, and Portugal. Gallery owners and artists staged protests and temporary museum lockdowns over the disparity in the lead-up to the fair.
The red dots were genuinely encouraging; the VAT conversation is a reminder that enthusiasm for art doesn’t automatically translate into equitable conditions for the people who make and sell it. Both things were true at once in this edition, and I think it would be dishonest to write about ARCO without acknowledging both.
What It Feels Like to Be There (and Why IRL Still Matters)
At Format, we exist in the digital space at the pulse of what artists and makers are presenting online, and we think seriously about how a platform can serve creative people at the highest level. Being at ARCOmadrid is, for me, a useful and joyful corrective to spending too much time in front of a screen.
There is no substitute for standing in front of a painting. No feed scroll replicates what it feels like to walk into a booth and have your breath catch, or to spend twenty minutes in front of a work you can’t entirely explain.
The temporality of a fair offers an urgency to see and learn as much as you can before it’s gone. This “city” exists for five days. After that, the work goes back out into the world. Back into studios and collections and institutions and storage, dispersed across thirty countries. Until the next edition, when another version of the same city gets built, and the conversation continues.
Final Take: Why ARCOmadrid Still Feels Essential
That continuity is worth naming; ARCO has been doing this for 45 years. The fair has outlasted trends, economic crises, and entire movements in contemporary art.
What keeps it essential isn’t just the quality of the galleries or the institutional acquisitions, rather it’s the fact that it is genuinely irreplaceable as a meeting point between Europe and Latin America, between the historical and the emerging, between the work and the people who care about it.
- 211 galleries
- 30 countries
- 1,300 artists
- An abundance of red dots
- A theme about the future that somehow made the present feel more vivid.
ARCOmadrid 2026 did not disappoint.
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Collaboratore
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Erica Beyea ha studiato Belle Arti all'Ontario College of Art & Design e si è laureata con lode all'Università NSCAD.
Nel 2014 ha fondato la Girls’ Art League a Toronto. Dal 2017 vive tra il Canada orientale e la Spagna. Attualmente vive a Saragozza, in Spagna.
