On an especially rainy few days in March, the great and good of the art world descended on ARCOmadrid, the Spanish capital’s annual contemporary art fair. Bringing together over a thousand artists and over 200 galleries from 36 countries, the event is nothing short of enormous. And while I saw familiar and favourite artists in the maze of booths – like the uncanny domestic sculptures of London-based artist Jack O’Brien (Capitain Petzel), and the campy digital vistas of American artist Jacolby Satterwhite (Kadel Willborn) – there was a lot that was less familiar to discover, both in the fair itself and at offsite events.

A special section, Wametisé: Ideas for an Amazofuturism, presented an immersive space dedicated to the Amazon, and the potential for hybrid existences between human, animal and plant life that it might inspire. Curated by Denilson Baniwa and María Wills, in collaboration with the Institute for Postnatural Studies, the pavilion included Claudia Andujar’s magical photographs (Vemelho gallery), the return of Colombian painter Carlos Jacanamijoy’s cosmic canvases (via Almine Rech) and the work of MAKHU, the Indigenous Brazilian collective who painted the central Pavillion’s monumental mural at last year’s Venice Biennale (Carmo Johnson projects).

Other highlights included Voloshyn Gallery, the Kyiv and Miami-based gallery (the latter space was opened after the war began, but the Ukrainian space managed to open its doors again in 2023) whose booth presented intergenerational works by artists with Latin American roots and ties – including emerging artist Jonathan Sanchez Noa, whose textural sculptures use Cuban tobacco as a medium to explore histories of colonial extraction. At the booth of RocioSantaCruz, a Barcelona-based gallery, one could discover the photography of Javier Inés, the late Spanish photographer who spent the 1980s immersed in the queer, underground, after-dark scene of Barcelona, producing the vibrant and stylish black-and-white portraits on display here. 

Offsite, Hans Ulrich Obrist curated new works by French painter Pol Taburet at the Pabellón de los Hexagonos, the iconic brick building which originally formed the Spanish Pavilion at the Brussels Universal Exposition of 1958, before being taken down and transported back to Madrid. Presented by the Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid, Taburet’s mysterious, part-airbrushed paintings represented the most explicit link between the city’s artistic history and its future to be found in Madrid this spring: the works, created by the artist especially for the space, derived from his hours spent in front of Francisco de Goya’s Black Paintings in the Prado museum. 

ARCOmadrid ran from 5-9 March, 2025. Visit their website here for updates of next year’s event.