From a distance, soaring through the air, the clarity of the turquoise blue sea from which the silhouette of Ibiza emerges can be seen in all its fullness.
The gray stone islets that surround it, the greenery of the pine trees that populate the interior territory.
They are the same colors and, above all, the same enveloping, almost mystical light found by Walter Benjamin, Raoul Hausmann, Hans Hinterreiter, Will Faber and so many other illustrious travelers in the 1930s.
Then, after World War II, the architect José Luis Sert and a whole host of Dutch and northern European painters landed in this corner of the Mediterranean.
Those who formed the group Ibiza 59 and those who followed in their footsteps in subsequent decades ended up giving this place the nickname of the island of artists, a name that, over time,
First edition of the CAN contemporary art fair in Ibiza, in July.Carles Ribas
Upon landing, the distances change the focus: there is no longer a square meter of the wild places that attracted those creators and intellectuals who wrote important chapters of the 20th century.
They have been taken away by hotels, apartments, nightclubs, endless lines of cars on the highway, beaches criss-crossed by rows of deckchairs.
Anyway, the place is still magnificent.
The old city preserves its centuries-old beauty and the sunsets are still spectacular.
But there was a time when natural and artistic splendor merged in this space to generate a moment that caressed the utopian.
“The story of art in Ibiza is the story of a lost opportunity”, summarizes, with resignation, Cati Verdera, veteran cultural manager of the island, who denounces, like other voices consulted,
institutional neglect.
That glow has faded, but it seems that lately something is beginning to move.
In the fresh and secluded space of the MACE (Museu d'Art Contemporani d'Eivissa), Elena Ruiz, its director for more than 30 years, underlines the need to "build the story" of how culture has been a fundamental element in the formation of the Ibizan identity.
"It's a story that can be told, that I want to tell, and that has very rich material," she says.
Located in a white building in Dalt Vila, the walled city, the MACE is one of the oldest contemporary art museums in Spain.
With the light that enters through the windows, it would hardly be necessary to illuminate the works in the collection that hang on the walls (one is the city wall itself), made up of a mixture of works by Ibizan artists —native and adopted— and the accumulated heritage of the art biennials that began to be held in the late Franco regime as a method of propaganda by the regime, which wanted to take advantage of the movement of artists on the island.
With the first fair, in 1964, the foundations of the museum were laid.
The last one was held in 2008 because, as Ruiz points out, the lack of budget forced her to decide "to bet on the museum".
Visitors during the contemporary art fair CAN ART FAIR.Carles Ribas
A visitor enjoys a painting at the art fair in Eivissa.Carles Ribas
'Onia', a work by Stella Rahola Mtutes, is exhibited at the Eivissa Museum of Contemporary Art.Carles Ribas
Celebration of the first edition of CAN ART FAIR 2022, art fair in Eivissa, Ibiza.Carles Ribas
View of the interior of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Eivissa.Carles Ribas
View of the Espacio Micus art gallery, in Ibiza.Carles Ribas
Work exhibited during the CAN ART FAIR art fair, in Eivissa.Carles Ribas
Elena Ruiz Sastre, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Eivissa.Carles Ribas
The Nave Salinas, in the municipality of Sant Josep de sa Talaia, during the assembly of the exhibition by Eva Beresin.Carles Ribas
View of the art fair CAN ART FAIR, in Eivissa.Carles Ribas
View of the Espacio Micus art gallery with works by Angela Glajcar.Carles Ribas
A group of visitors enjoys the art fair in Eivissa.Carles Ribas
In Ibiza, a place of transit and refuge for travellers, the Phoenicians, Romans, Visigoths, Muslims... and numerous contemporary artists lived throughout the centuries.
The most relevant were the abstract painters who formed the Ibiza 59 group (founded that year), in which names such as Erwin Broner and Hans Laabs participated.
Erwin Bechtold, who at 97 is still living in Ibiza, and Antonio Ruiz, 99, who lives in Soria, still live.
Outside the collective, the artist and head of the Ibograf engraving workshop, Don Kunkel (born 1933), returned to his native USA after a life in the Mediterranean.
Among the Spaniards, the inimitable Zush, today called Evru, lived here between 1968 and 1983, a time that he himself defines as "the happiest years" of his existence.
Until November 30, MACE exhibits a retrospective of that period, a selection of experimental works that began the
big bang
of its particular parallel universe encapsulated in a mental state: the Evrugo Mental State.
In the sixties, powerful galleries were also established, such as the disappeared Ivan Spence and Carl van der Voort, a space that Cati Verdera (who was previously in charge of MACE and several biennials), directed for two decades until its closure in the first 2000. The exorbitant prices for renting the space put the nail in the coffin of the project, a factor that continues to be decisive in explaining why new art businesses do not open on an island loaded with visitors with purchasing power.
What remains today of the artistic exuberance of that time?
After a time in which electronic music has been the main synonym of culture on the island, some novelties related to fine arts are emerging.
The most recent news is the birth of a contemporary art fair, CAN, which was held between July 13 and 17 in the capital with 36 galleries from 13 countries.
This is an event promoted by Sergio Sancho, the organizer of Madrid's Urvanity.
"Last year, while visiting Ibiza, I realized that in the art world almost everything stops from June to September," the director told EL PAÍS on the day of the opening.
That's where the idea came from, he immediately got to work and, to his surprise, in 12 months everything was set up.
“I see a good atmosphere, I see people relaxed.
It is not like in other fairs where it seems that everyone is more focused on selling”, pointed out Sancho, who scheduled the appointment only in the afternoons to encourage that calm spirit.
At the close of this first edition, the organization provided sales figures of 80% of the exhibited works, 5,000 visitors, 250 collectors and the intention of expanding the parallel activities to give shape to an "art week" next year. .
The newly opened Parra y Romero Gallery in the town of Santa Gertrudis, in Ibiza.Carles Ribas
Curated by the critic and curator Sasha Bogojev, CAN's proposal is obviously focused on a young and international audience.
As Sancho explains, and as the name of the fair indicates, Contemporary Art Now, it tries to show what is happening in the art world in real time.
And that, for Bogojev, means colourful, very pop, comic-inspired, video game-inspired and Instagram-inspired paintings and sculptures, cheeky and light-hearted.
The stands were full of creations by mid-career artists, almost all under 40 years of age, with prices between 1,500 and 200,000 euros and selected for a specific collector profile: entrepreneurs from the technology and music sectors who spend the summer and/or They work on the island.
If something was missing, perhaps, it was Ibizan spaces and artists.
“Well, there are not many galleries”,
Sancho noted.
“And that the artists here have more presence?
I don't know to what extent at the Madrid fair the artists would have to be from Madrid.
But of course we want to strengthen ties with the base of the culture and permeate the local level”.
open out of season
After the progressive decline of the splendor of the sixties, today the only renowned commercial art space in Ibiza is the Madrid-based Parra & Romero, which set up a branch just 10 years ago in a warehouse that operates during the summer months .
They celebrated the anniversary a couple of months ago with a new venue that will remain open almost all year round to contribute, as the director, Guillermo Romero, points out, to the ever-pending task of “deseasonalizing” Ibiza, where almost everything goes out during the winter.
Romero, who is divided between the two galleries, chose this enclave because of his personal love affair with the island.
His outlook is optimistic and he believes the public will respond in the offseason.
For now, he says, they have had an average of 150 visitors a day.
“The cliché that Ibiza is a party place is wrong:
It is a place with many faces, and one of them is culture.
Historical figures such as Tristan Tzara have passed through here to great current creators such as Paul Auster, Yves Michaud, Andreas Gursky, Jil Sander…”, says Romero, who boasts of coexistence between his space and the local businesses that flank him and praises the cosmopolitan quality and at the same time proudly local that makes Ibiza a unique place.
"It has been a success to open in the town."
The artist Eva Beresin, in front of one of her works, which is shown in the Nave Salinas, in Sant Josep, Ibiza.Carles Ribas
The Nave Salinas, part of the foundation of the Colombian collector Lío Malca, is based on a stone mass that once housed a salt warehouse.
At the gates, the views of the coast hypnotize.
Inside, the natural beauty is transformed into a murky and mind-blowing pictorial landscape.
The center began exhibiting contemporary art seven years ago: every summer since 2015 (with the forced break in 2020) they organize an exhibition accompanied by workshops for students.
After showing some flashy artists like Keith Haring and Bill Viola, this year they bet on the paintings of the more unknown Eva Beresin, an interesting Hungarian creator based in Vienna who uses art as a tool to exorcise the pain that "she carries in her DNA”, as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.
“My works are cynical,
These more or less recent proposals coexist with the Espai Micus project established for more than two decades, a gallery where Katja, daughter of the German artist Eduard Micus, who settled in Ibiza in the seventies, preserves her father's legacy to the time it exhibits other artists, both local and foreign.
Even if it were just to see the place, it would be worth crossing the narrow stone path at the end of which you can see this building, a dazzling space of 800 square meters, whitewashed and with open windows in height, built adapting to the orography and respecting the surrounding trees and rocks.
A native Ibizan, Ángeles Ferragut, adds another point to the artistic fabric of the island with some artistic residences that she has been organizing since 2016 on her own estate,
a project that this year has been expanded with an exhibition space, all under the umbrella of the Ses 12 Naus Foundation.
With residents such as Ana Laura Aláez, Santiago Ydáñez and Damian Poulain, they have sponsored works "either inspired by or in collaboration with agents from the island", as Ferragut explains.
Ses12Naus creation center, in the Can Bufí neighborhood of Ibiza.
In the image, the founders, Simon Southwood and Ángeles Ferragut, between works by Santiago Ydáñez (left) and Ana Laura Aláez.
Carlos Ribas
Scattered throughout this land to which the poet Antonio Colinas has sung so much, there are more testimonies of the role of art and architecture in the formation of the identity of modern Ibiza: the Broner house, a rationalist building built in 1960 by Erwin Broner , a disciple of Le Corbusier, which preserves its original furniture;
the Estudi Tur Costa, a gallery founded by the Ibizan painter, who died in 2020;
the Piget Museum, which houses the work of the figurative painters and also natives of the island Narcís Puget Riquer and Narcís Puget Viñas... Lune Rouge and Art Projects Ibiza, two galleries set up by Guy Laliberté, controversial billionaire and creator of Cirque du Soleil, moved to Montréal in 2020. After years of collecting works by the artists who exhibited at Van der Voort,
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