The attack on Iran will affect art sales at Arco

MadridAnother war. Four years after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the US attacks on Iran have once again brought economic uncertainty to the Arco art fair, whose new edition began this Wednesday for collectors and professionals. Wars scare off money, and according to gallery owner Marc Domènech, the attack on Iran will affect sales "until after the Art Basel fair," that is, in June. After that, who knows what might happen?

"There's always a market for important works by established artists, but in these circumstances, smaller works and young artists suffer," Domènech explains. Among the works displayed at his stand, he highlights a couple of paintings by José Guerrero that had been in his studio for forty years, and he mentions that he has already sold a painting by Esther Boix. And at the ADN gallery stand, Eugenio Merino once again touches on the sensitive issue with a sculpture, Rights drum, consisting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights written on an oil drum.

The other Spanish artist who has stirred up the most controversy at Arco in recent years, Santiago Sierra, returns to the Prometeo gallery with a photograph of two drug addicts with a piece of their heads shaved off. Sierra paid them with a dose of heroin to let him cut their hair. Prometeo also has for sale the remains of the King Felipe VI effigy that Sierra made with Merino in 2019. It was mandatory that the buyer burn it, which deterred several Latin American collectors. But since it didn't sell, the artists themselves burned it in a street in Berga on October 12, 2020. Now the skull, which is fireproof, the ashes, and the video of the burning are for sale. No images are available.

The recent attacks in Iran have directly affected the Abu Dhabi-based Green Gallery, whose director, Yasmin Atassi, was unable to fly to Madrid. This gallery is exhibiting the work of one of the few Iranian artists at the fair, the multidisciplinary creator Nazgol Ansarinia. Her pieces at the fair relate to the proliferation of swimming pools in Tehran, allowing her to connect the domestic sphere with the global problem of drought. Ansarinia is also known for having arrived in the United States two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, and for analyzing the new discourses on security and immigration restrictions directed at the Arab and Iranian world in her book series. National Security BooksAnd there is another Iranian artist, Shirin Neshat, represented in the Italian gallery with one of her characteristic photographs from the series Women of AllahThese are self-portraits with feminist texts predating the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Meanwhile, Afghan artist Kubra Khademi has caused a stir at the fair with a painting ofa lesbian orgy major world leaders to demand the rights of Afghan women.

A still life by Juan Gris worth 4.2 million euros

Be that as it may, art fairs are often like a microcosm where global turbulence resonates in a subdued way. In the art world, it's necessary to carefully gauge the degree of reality that is tolerable and the way in which it is expressed. In this edition of ARCO, with 211 galleries from 30 countries, 17 of them Catalan, the bubble trembled slightly with a group photograph in which nearly a hundred artists participated to demand a reduction in the VAT rate for galleries.

And as every year, the most expensive works were brought by galleries specializing in the avant-garde. Leandro Navarro has the most expensive one, Grape, by Juan Gris, valued at 4.2 million euros. He is an artist underrepresented in state public collections, although the Telefónica Foundation made an effort in the 1980s to include him. Guillermo de Osma has a still life by Giorgio Morandi for sale for 3 million euros and a small female nude by Henri Matisse for 2 million euros. In the field of sculpture, the Mayoral gallery is presenting a concrete sculpture by Chillida. Leku III (€1.9 million). They also have, reserved, a Picasso sketch for one of the murals on the COAC façade. Since it's reserved, they aren't disclosing the price. And Thaddaeus Ropac owns one of Baselitz's gigantic upside-down self-portraits (€1.5 million). Another work priced at over €1 million is the hanging sculpture Yellow sphereby Jesús Rafael Soto, although the Elvira González gallery hasn't specified the price.

Lorca, Picasso, Roser Bru

Historical memory brings some of the discoveries from this edition of Arco. The Memoria gallery exhibits Spain in my heart (1983), a seven-meter-long silkscreen print in which Roser Bru drew a parallel between the impact of the Civil War on her parents' generation, evoked by the soldier's head falling in Robert Capa's famous photograph, and her own experience of Pinochet's coup. It includes fragments of two poems by Pablo Neruda, one in support of the Second Republic and the other in memory of Francesc Macià. In addition, the gallery exhibits her interpretation of the Gernica by the Croatian Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos. And two galleries, Albarran Bourdais and Guillermo de Osma, are exhibiting a sculpture of an exultant Federico García Lorca, by Fernando Sánchez Castillo, and a full-length portrait by José Caballero, respectively.