Madrid Hosts a Lively Opening Week for Contemporary Art
Madrid’s gallery scene kicks off its exhibition season with a showcase that highlights the best of contemporary art. The event signals the start of a sequence of openings across the city, drawing attention from collectors, critics, and curious visitors alike. Highlights include a group of artists who bring fresh perspectives to painting, sculpture, and installation. One notable duo features an artist from Alcoy now based in London, alongside a photographer from Alicante living between Madrid and London. The openings reveal a dynamic cross between cities and artistic traditions, marking a vibrant moment for the Madrid gallery circuit.
After years exploring installation, performance, and highly conceptual practices, Rosana Antolí returns to painting and figurative sculpture. Her aim is to embody ideas in material form while inviting more imaginative narratives that remain tightly choreographed. The new work pushes storytelling through visual sequences that invite viewers to walk through a developing scene rather than merely observe a set of objects.
In past projects, Antolí drew inspiration from enigmatic subjects such as immortal jellyfish and the Welwitschia plant, now she shifts focus to the tardigrade, a microscopic and exceptionally resilient organism known for surviving extreme conditions. The artist asks what might happen if humans could interbreed with such tiny beings, sparking questions about hybridity, adaptation, and what future life might look like when biology and art fuse.
Information about the work is provided alongside the piece titled The Worm, a painting by Rosana Antolí, which visitors can view as part of the ongoing exhibition. The piece sits at the intersection of science, nature, and metaphor, inviting contemplation on life’s persistent endurance and the imagination required to envision new possibilities.
There are professionals in science who are already examining tardigrades for medical research, including chemotherapy. Antolí’s work gestures toward these real-world connections, suggesting that new life pathways and worlds in which humans share space with other living forms could be explored through art. The artist uses a medium of sculpture and painting crafted from plastic components, glass, and water drawn from the Mediterranean. These materials symbolize life and breath, contained within vessels that seem to carry the artist’s own respiration as a visual metaphor. The gallery space is transformed into a womb-like environment, an organic laboratory where fresh life ideas are nurtured and tested through form and motion.
Alongside Antolí, a solo presentation by Alberto Feijóo from Alicante opens in Madrid. The exhibition assembles photographs and collages created in three cities—Alicante, London, and New York—over the past year. The aim is to reflect a tension between natural and artificial elements and to trace a personal journey across borders. Feijóo notes that his life is a continual shift among places, and photography mirrors this transition through changes in image scale and perspective. Some studio works feel restrained and deliberate, while other pieces emerge more spontaneously, capturing moments of improvisation that reveal the artist’s intuitive process.
Feijóo presents a five-part installation that features cubic columns surrounded by paintings. The arrangement breaks away from flat, two-dimensional rendering by introducing a three-dimensional experience. Inside this space, the collage unfolds and the viewer is invited to move through the work, creating a new sense of depth and spatial relation. The overall presentation emphasizes how material choices and spatial design can expand the viewer’s understanding of image and object, turning a gallery visit into a brief encounter with a shifting, immersive environment.
Both artists bring a shared curiosity about how life, form, and perception intersect. The Madrid opening thus becomes more than a display; it is a dialogue about how contemporary practice can fuse scientific curiosity with artistic expression. Visitors can expect works that challenge the boundaries between painting and sculpture, between nature and technology, and between the personal and the universal. This season promises a compelling start to Madrid’s art calendar, inviting audiences to explore new narratives that emerge when living materials, light, and space meet in the same room.