Rossella Farinotti in dialogue with Art Madrid director Alberto Cornejo Alcaraz

Kooness team had a conversation with Alberto Cornejo Alcaraz, director of Art Madrid at its 15th edition, a fair that will take place in the beautiful venue Galería de Cristal del Palacio de Cibeles in the city centre. Last year the fair motto quoted: “the most international edition yet”. In this 2020 Art Madrid still improved and grew, becoming a focal point for international art in Madrid. While waiting for the fair, a new program of activities, curated by Mario Gutiérrez Cru, opened to the public few days ago.

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Dear Alberto, Art Madrid, thanks to you and your team efforts and constant work, improved its ideas every year. You have new galleries from all Europe, as Berlin, Paris or Bologna. How many countries participate this year? 

This year we are lucky to have 14 galleries from 9 different countries. They come from France, Portugal, Austria, Germany, Italy, Ecuador, Cuba and Taiwan, and Spain, of course. For us, it’s essential to really have become an international fair and see that year after year we receive several submissions from foreigner exhibitors that want to explore the Spanish market. 

What are the challenges that you expect? 

In this edition, the biggest challenge is to turn the fair into a truly festive event about contemporary art. We carry out strategies to continue attracting a more plural art-loving audience, not only through our program of actions, usually more innovative, but also with the collaboration of agents that contribute to renew our proposal, including curators and artists. There are never two fairs alike. 

Did Art Madrid become a crucial point for emergent and fresh art you are dealing with in Spain? 

Yes, Art Madrid always aims to be an event to discover new artists and young galleries, and as a place to start collecting. In addition to developing the One Project program, we have strengthened our commitment to boost and to give space and visibility to the most daring and cutting-edge artistic proposals, promoting in this way a line of debate among the several cultural agents that energise the current contemporary art scene. 

Last year you developed the curated section “ONE PROJECT” that now is going to have a new project titled “Salvajes”. What is the theme? 

Art Madrid’20 expands and transforms One Project into a more heterogeneous and polyhedral context where 9 artists will share a differentiated area, exhibiting their work two by two, generating a scenario of friction and artistic stimulus. Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta, an art critic and independent curator, coordinates the selection of the 5 participating galleries under the discursive line of "Salvajes: La cage aux fauves". The program activates the research on the market and the fairs as legitimate institutions of the professional careers in the art world, but also in fashion, tendencies and major trends focusing its attention on those resistant artists who decide to go through paths far away from them. "Salvajes" takes as a starting point the classic dichotomy that existed between the great official salons and those creators who subverted the state of the question, either from their convoluted participation in them or by generating new alternative devices such as independent or des refusés salons. The artists selected for One Project work from different perspectives of contemporary creation, presenting projects of a unique nature and specific to the fair. 

Cover image: Portrait of Alberto Cornejo Alcaraz. ​

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