Mood of war

When the mood is one of war, it is hardly one for buying art. The contemporary art fair Art Dubai was scheduled to take place from April 17 to 19, 2026, in the tourist hub of the United Arab Emirates. On March 2, just two days after the outbreak of the violent American-Israeli conflict against Iran that set the region ablaze, the fair’s organizers wrote to participants stating rather vaguely that they hoped “this period of uncertainty would pass quickly” and that priority would be given to security. For the time being, the event has therefore not been cancelled.

Spain major cultural event

Meanwhile, only four days after the start of this war in the Middle East, the opening of ARCO took place in Madrid, Spain’s major cultural and commercial event devoted to contemporary art. It brings together 211 galleries. Thirty-four percent are Spanish, and the majority of foreign participants and artists on view are from Latin America.

Maribel Lopez

At the time of the opening, the conflict was on everyone’s mind. “We have been preparing the event for a year,” explains Maribel Lopez, the director of the fair. “Of course there is a psychological impact due to this context. But the fair has a responsibility to bring a certain sense of positivity at this moment. Art is also a tool that helps us grasp the complexity of situations.”

Within the global constellation of art fairs, ARCO is an event that might be classified as “reasonable.” There are very few multinational galleries presenting works by young artists priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. According to Maribel Lopez, the average transaction takes place around 50,000 euros: “from 400 euros up to several million for modern masters such as Picasso or Miró.”

Nikita Kadan

But the war inevitably made its way into the fair. The French gallerist Jérôme Poggi devoted almost his entire booth to Ukrainian artists. Particularly striking is a charcoal drawing by Nikita Kadan (born in 1982) that reproduces on a monumental scale (280 x 300 cm), in black and white, a small macabre painting by  Théodore Géricault, Study of Feet and Hands, created for the famous Raft of the Medusa (for sale at 60,000 euros). Kadan is an artist who uses different media to recount the current reality of his country. “To do so, he likes to draw on French Romanticism, a period that was also witnessing the collapse of society,” comments Jérôme Poggi. His works are held, among other collections, by Tate in London and the Centre Pompidou.

TBA21

At the same booth, the young conceptual artists Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, who work with video, have created a film showing the museum of the Ukrainian port city of Kherson, vandalized and empty after the passage of Russian troops. On the soundtrack: bombardments (for sale at 13,000 euros). The two artists are also the subject of a remarkable exhibition at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, where they evoke the presence of war indirectly: children who cannot sleep, young men mimicking dead bodies. The project was carried out in collaboration with TBA21, a foundation created by the highly influential collector Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, who is currently supporting artists from Kyiv.

Alexander Apostol

At ARCO, current events are everywhere. The Paris gallery Mor-Charpentier, a specialist in Latin American art, is showing, among others, the work of the Venezuelan artist Alexander Apostol (born in 1969), who lives in Madrid. “In Venezuela, for a long time artists have spoken about the political problems gripping the country. In the 1980s and 1990s a very strong base of collectors sustained the local art market. But today Venezuelans have no desire to import the conflict into their homes by hanging this kind of artwork on their walls. We will see whether the change of regime following the recent American intervention will unblock things,” notes Alex Mor, co-founder of the gallery.

Alex Mor

Apostol uses photography in a conceptual and political way. The work presented at the fair consists of four large black-and-white photographs depicting four improvised shields made by students during the 2018 demonstrations to protect themselves from the police (for sale at 20,000 euros). The Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Guggenheim in New York, and MOCA in Los Angeles all hold works by the artist, according to Alex Mor. “There is a significant gap between his institutional success and his market. His prices remain stable, as is often the case with conceptual art.”

Maruja Mallo

The world of museums and international biennials is currently seeking out bodies of work that were long overlooked for various reasons. This is the case, for example, with Maruja Mallo (1902–1995), an astonishing Surrealist painter who is the subject of a major exhibition at the Reina Sofía Museum. Perhaps because she lived in Madrid and later Buenos Aires, or perhaps because she was a woman… In any case, she remains virtually unknown outside her own country.(We will soon speak, in the same vein, about the British artist who lived in Mexico Leonora Carrington, who is now the subject of a certain enthusiasm at auction.)

No work by her was shown at ARCO. “We have lent everything we had to the Reina Sofía,” explains the Madrid dealer Guillermo de Osma, who co-authored the artist’s catalogue raisonné. In 2003, one of her very dark paintings that had belonged to the Surrealist theorist André Breton reached 260,000 euros at auction. More recently, it seems that her paintings may have reached one million euros in private sales. That is only fair.

Paul McCarthy

In Madrid, private collectors Ana Gervas and David Cantolla inaugurated in June 2025 a 450-square-meter space called Solo CSV. Within what resembles a club filled with artworks of every kind, a commercial gallery has been installed. This time it is collaborating with the multinational gallery Hauser & Wirth. It is presenting the work of one of the very political American artists of our time, Paul McCarthy (born in 1945). McCarthy is known for his paintings and installations that play with the grotesque and with imagery drawn from the entertainment industry. Here, with the complicity of the German actress Lilith Stangenberg, he drew inspiration from the 1974 film The Night Porter to produce, among other things, a series of large drawings. According to him, it is a reference to fascism and to American society, politics being, in his view, part of pop culture.

Fascism

 

“I had difficulty getting this series accepted by the art world,” the artist explains. Indeed, some characters in these works on paper, sketched with sweeping gestures, make explicit reference to Hitler. Today one of the grand figures of American contemporary art, McCarthy lost his home and his studio in the Los Angeles fires. Yet he did not wish to show overtly commercial work here. His large sheets are priced at around 200,000 euros.

ARCO. Madrid. Through March 8.