Trump inside a dishwasher: political art is an exception in the new edition of Arco

MadridWars shake the art market, but the market resists. While Donald Trump shakes the world order, the 44th edition of the Arco fair started in Madrid on Wednesday, with a surprisingly low presence of protest art. It is true that the objectives at Arco are to buy and sell works of art, and that many of the 214 participating galleries closed the selection of works months ago, but, even so, it is striking not to find more political art. As Francesc Torres wrote about the paintings he exhibits at the T20 gallery, art offers "a small space of freedom, even if it is small, fragile and in many cases fictitious, but it serves to survive." He also warns in the motto of one of the works that The politician is not what makes political art art, and in another that Don't make art unless you have a very good reason.

Another of Francesc Torres' works is one of the most forceful that can be seen at the fair: it is a triptych with a swastika with the word latent Above, a cross with the motto "leave me alone" and a black rectangle where you can barely read "deep exile", a reference to the loss of memory. On the other hand, the T20 gallery exhibits a miniature version of the well-known Christ nailed to a war plane by León Ferrari (of which there is a larger version in the Museum of Forbidden Art in Barcelona), another reference of more committed art to whom Torres, in a certain way, winked.a gigantic installation in the Oval Room of the MNAC Aeronautics (flight) interior in 2021. "Francesc Torres has the power of a young artist, his political involvement is constant," says Nacho Ruiz, the founder of the gallery along with Carolina Parra. "We have always worked with political artists, it is part of our essence. But we must not be confused, Arco is not a museum, it does not have the component of no profit", he explains.

Among the gallery owners participating in the fair, royal politics hits Ukrainian Julia Voloshyna, who lives in Miami with her family, particularly hard. Voloshyna cannot believe the Trump's booing of Zelensky. "When I saw it, I was very sad. Our people have been fighting and dying for three years, and in the conversation I heard that Trump does not respect us. It is very strange: the United States was the one who gave the most support to Ukraine, and now they have stopped doing so," Voloshyna stresses. However, she does not plan to leave Miami, because her daughter is very young. "It is not safe to return to Ukraine, and we have nowhere to live because we left Ukraine before the war. And in Europe, we tried to settle in Austria and they did not give us asylum status because we are not refugees; our passport expired and two months later we left for the United States." Voloshyna opened the gallery in Kiev in 2016 and the one in Miami in 2023. The one in Kiev once functioned as a refuge, and after a few years of presenting works related to their country at Arco, this year they have opted for another cause: indigenous struggles.

Abascal, Meloni, Milei, Le Pen and Musk

Be that as it may, Eugenio Merino, the author of theFranco sculpture on a refrigerator, has once again created the most widely distributed work of the fair, in the Barcelona gallery ADN: Whitewashing [Facelift] consists of a dishwasher with seventeen plates inside printed with the faces of Donald Trump and sixteen other representatives of the far right, including Santiago Abascal, Giorgia Meloni, Javier Milei, Marine Le Pen and Elon Musk. The gallery claims that the dishwasher could work, and that the faces of the politicians would fade with each wash. Whitewashing It is the most popular of Arco with the permission of another work, by Ramon Mateos, exhibited in the Freijo gallery: a black metal curtain with the number 7,291 painted on it, corresponding to the number of victims of Madrid residences during the Covid pandemic, and a subsequent censored documentary.

Without abandoning American politics, but focusing on the war between Israel and Palestine, Alex Reynolds presents the video at the Luis Adelantado gallery stand Aside from issues with no answers [A Lot of Unanswered Questions], based on a recording of a 2023 press conference by former White House spokesman John Kirby. In order to criticize the excessive demands for clarification, evasions and misrepresentations of journalists' questions, Reynolds has cut him off for only giving voice to journalists.

And for Jonas Roßmeißl, represented by the Berlin gallery Klemm's, the image of the United States is now that of a defeated, mutilated Statue of Liberty who, instead of the book with the American Constitution, carries a box with purchased human genetic material in her left arm.

Rauschenberg and Miró, the most sought after

The start of this edition of Arco has been bittersweet. Helga de Alvear, one of the most prominent Spanish gallery owners and a regular buyer at the fair, died a month ago, and the director of the fair, Maribel López, and dozens of gallery owners and collectors have remembered her with applause. The first day of the fair has also been a day of protest: Spanish gallery owners have turned off the lights of their stands for five minutes to continue demanding the reduction of VAT on art from 21% to 10% or 4%. Gallery owners such as Íñigo Navarro, director of the Leandro Navarro gallery, regret that the 21% VAT puts them at a disadvantage compared to their French and German colleagues, and they assure that the gallery business is not a sector only for the "rich".

As for the most sought-after works, as is often the case, they correspond to great modern and contemporary artists, including, in the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, the diptych by Robert Rauschenberg Garden Stretch (Urban Bourbon), from 1988, with a price of 1.7 million euros. Joan Miró is back at the top of the prices with Tête aux three cheveux ante la lune (1976), for sale at the Leandro Navarro gallery for 1.6 million, 200,000 euros more than Rinaldo Annamari Luna Rossi, a painting by Alighiero Boetti sold by the Barcelona gallery Mayoral. And for less than a million euros, another of the most iconic images of this fair is an iron sculpture of a root by Ai Weiwei (650,000 euros) together with the painting by Miquel Barceló. On the branch, starring a gorilla (600,000 euros).

On the institutional front, the Spanish monarchs have officially inaugurated the fair and have ended their tour in the space of the Joan Miró Foundation coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the institution.