Arco recovers the pulse of sales despite the pandemic and the war in Ukraine

The first three days of Arco close today, Friday, before the non-specialized public arrives, with that feeling of cyclothymia that marks the pandemic.

On Wednesday the euphoria was perceived in the incessant movement from one side to the other of the contemporary art fair of collectors, buyers and experts who arrived at Ifema trapped by the songs of the new normality of this 40+1 edition.

The first day is usually the day where more transactions take place and this is how the gallery owners manifested it.

Since Thursday, that feeling has not been abandoned but is accompanied by uneasiness and concern about the war in Ukraine.

Will the Russian military intervention affect the art market?

According to the first data on purchases from Spanish institutions and the feelings of gallery owners, the answer, for now, is no.

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The Reina Sofía Museum, through the Ministry of Culture, has purchased 16 works that will add to the funds of its permanent collection for 370,000 euros.

In the summer of 2021, in the particular Arco call that was held on unusual dates for the fair, with fewer galleries and strong restrictions, the cultural institution spent somewhat less, 300,000 euros.

In this edition, pieces by 15 artists, most of them Spanish, have been acquired.

There is in these purchases a clear imprint of the idea that Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Reina Sofía, has impressed on the reorganization of the permanent collection that he presented at the end of 2021 with, for example, the 36 black and white photographs of the

series

(1936).

Antoni Campañà documents the process of graffiti with political messages on Spanish trains by anti-fascist artists.

That essence also appears in the work of the young Eva Fàbregas, (Barcelona, ​​1988), whose latest sculptures mix the culture of well-being or therapeutic subcultures in social networks.

In both cases there is a reflection of popular culture, in two different historical moments, which for the director of the Museum must be one of the essential resources of a public art gallery to try to explain the time in which we live.

The Reina Sofía has also bought works by Miguel Benlloch, Patricia Esquivias

Patricia Gómez and María Jesús González, Federico Guzmán, Agustín Ibarrola, Concha Jerez, Antoni Miralda and the Filipino multimedia artist Cian Dayrit (Manila, 1989), among others.

The Community of Madrid has spent 405,000 euros, compared to 130,000 euros in the July edition, on works for the CA2M collection, the contemporary art museum in Móstoles.

In the selection there is a mixture of historical artists such as Darío Villalba or Walter Marchetti, Soledad Sevilla or Marisa González and other more contemporary ones.

The Government of the region has completed the catalog of artists within the Museum's programming with Francesc Ruiz, Javier Utray or Renate Lorenz & Pauline Boudry.

And it has added the work of the Colombian artist Iván Argote who has presented the

he did in Madrid when days before the fair he paraded a replica of the statue of Columbus through the streets of the capital.

The Madrid City Council has bought four works, worth 56,870 euros for the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Among the gallery owners consulted and in the absence of official data, the feeling was one of joy at returning to a normality that they did not have in July 2021, although they celebrated that Arco was one of the only fairs in the world that had managed not to cancel any edition during the pandemic.

The organization has not offered figures, but it has provided a list of the main buyers, among which was also the TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, which has been made with the work of, among others, Kader Attia, Jacobo Castellano, Regina de Miguel, and Theresa alone.

The María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Foundation has purchased works by Remigio Mendiburu, Antoni Tàpies, Glenda León and Ignasí Aballí, head of the Spanish pavilion at the upcoming Venice Biennale.

DKV Seguros, the Mariano Yera Collection and the María José Jove Foundation join in the purchases.

“The institutional acquisitions have been confirmed.

Perhaps I notice a little more reluctance to confirm any private operation”, explains gallery owner José de la Mano.

Helga de Alvear, for example, recounted the first day that she had bought eight works for her museum in Cáceres, among which a screen print by Donald Judd to Elvira Gonzalez stands out for 190,000 euros, works by Inés Medina and a sculpture by Sapiro in Cayón .

The gallery owner hoped to buy more.

"I'm very vicious," she said with irony and a smile that was harder for her to find in 2021 with sales plummeting due to the lack of foreign buyers due to mobility restrictions.