Arco would not be Arco without its dose of controversy, those scandalous works that attract all the flashes and provide a topic of conversation in the hallways for a crowd of rich collectors in search of exciting and dangerous art. In its more than four decades of existence, there have been something for all tastes. From an installation by Wolf Vostell consisting of seven dead dogs that provoked intolerable stenches and the anger of Franco’s animal activists in a Coca-Cola refrigerator owned by Eugenio Merino, the half-full, half-empty glass that Wilfredo Prieto sold for 20,000 euros or the ninot that represented King Felipe VI that its authors (Merino and Santiago Sierra) later burned in a Fallas ceremony in Berga. The 43rd contemporary art fair that today opens its doors at Ifema only for professionals and collectors (as of Friday it will do so for the general public) already has its candidate. But it is not a novelty, which is still significant for an edition that seems to seek calm and solace in strident colors and painting, but rather the reappearance of a homoerotic sculpture that, laugh at the controversy it aroused when it was presented in 1983, today it is the subject of censorship on Instagram.
“The director at that time, Juana de Aizupuru, who was very modern and very her, sent libels to my gallery owner [Fefa Seiquier] to remove that man. She said that it didn’t let her sleep. But she resisted, because the stand was always packed,” recalls Rodrigo Muñoz Ballester, the author of Manuel. In the sculpture, the tangerine cartoonist represented himself hugging the naked body of an unrequited love, a young man named Manuel that he had met in a swimming pool. His heart, illuminated in red, galloping syncopated with his desire. “It is considered the first queer work of Spanish art,” says gallery owner José de la Mano, who in addition to Rodrigo has recovered other queer artists of the Transition, such as the Costus (of whom they present El Niño de Sanlúcar, a naked portrait with a towel of a very young Carlos Lozano), Juan Hidalgo or Carlos Fons Bada.
It took Rodrigo six years to build Manuel (he then told the story in installments in the pages of La Luna, Borja Casani’s Movida magazine, and later published it with a cult comic) and he has always kept it at the foot of the bed. , with the exception of the six years that the American collector and Tate advisor had it who bought it when he saw it at the fair. Upon his death, it was returned to its author, but it remained for months in Barajas, waiting for someone to pay the 600,000 pesetas that it cost to store it. Rodrigo, who did not have the money, told the warehouse manager the history of the work and he, moved, allowed him to take it. Now it is for sale again for 80,000 euros.
“I have no idea how much it could be worth. How can you adapt your emotion to the market? Of course I have to pay for a roof and I have to eat! But with a sandwich like the one I just bought on the subway for 2.30 euros, I am happy,” explains Rodrigo. He is looking forward to seeing what will happen these days at the fair, but he hopes to have as much fun as he did in ’83. They cleaned the package every morning. ‘We left it like money,’ they told me.” But the best “was a very old lady painted like a parrot who came every noon with a folding chair and only opened her mouth to say ‘if only Federico could see this!’. And I asked my gallery owner, Fefa, but what is this? Do they come from asylums or what? And she told me ‘no, she is Maruja Mallo and Federico is García Lorca.’
Arco 2024, the most Instagrammable piece, is subject to censorship on social networks. But there is much more to see at the fair that the Kings officially inaugurate this afternoon. 205 galleries from 36 countries are participating, with a special section dedicated to the Caribbean, and more than 350 collectors running through the halls (they have long since ditched their stilettos for sneakers), with the advantage that many of them, especially the Latin Americans, it has no longer been necessary to invite them because, as its director, Maribel López, recognized, they have established their domicile in Madrid. The world is in uproar but, for the moment, the art business continues its march.
Despite Israel’s relentless bombing of Palestine, Russia’s war against Ukraine, the worsening ecological crises around the world or the threat of the far right, the fair seems like a safe and predictable bubble, immune to what is happening outside. . Political art has lost prominence and painting is back, to satisfy a more cautious market.
Everything is for sale and there are amazing prices. Joan Miró is once again at the top of the most expensive pieces with Painting, one of the 27 works on Masonite that he made after the Civil War broke out as an exorcism, of which only two remain in Spain, at the Fundació Miró and in the Thyssen. It is sold in Leandro Navarro’s gallery for 3.3 million euros. There is a Picasso in the Guillermo de Osma gallery for 2.5 million and in Cayón you can buy Iron in the Tremor for 1.2 million, Chillida’s sculpture that won an award at the 1958 Venice Biennale.
