ARCO Art fair Madrid 2026

ARCOmadrid is a big international art fair like Basel or Frieze, yet it has different characteristics:

• Spanish public institutions, such as museums and regional governments, buy from a pre-approved annual budget. Those acquisitions are pre-arranged commitments, not spontaneous reactions. That also means that most acquired art is Spanish or Latin American. Galleries representing artists from other cultures have little chance to sell.
• The fair's core collectors operate in the middle market, spending between a few thousand and tens of thousands of euros (to a maximum of 60 thousand euros). These buyers make decisions based on personal collecting goals, not international headlines.

Quoting Gallerist José de la Mano:

"Institutions that do not usually have a strong purchasing budget have stepped up this year and do have one. I do see that private collecting is very prudent. If they are works under €15,000, a quick decision is made, but if they are over €60,000, you notice that it takes more effort." (source: La Razon)

Key numbers

• 206 galleries, 34% are from Spain.
• General Program: 175 galleries
• Curated Section: 48 galleries
• ARCOmadrid holds its unique position as a Latin American focal point in Europe
• 11 Latin American countries represented
• Latin American galleries: Over 40.
• Latin American countries present: 11. Brazil, 19 galleries, and Argentina, 15.
• The Madrid City Council bought four works for over 70,000 euros
• The Regional Government of Andalusia acquired eleven works for around 145,000 euros
• The Reina Sofía Museum acquired pieces for its collection for an amount approaching 500,000 euros

General Programme

Artists take a political stance

The fair includes overtly political or social works. There is more and more work focused on informing and raising awareness, yet there is still no active solution or plan proposed to address the problems in their work (a part of the idea of making money by selling art). Below are the most noticed by the visitors.

World women leaders

Kubra Khademi's installation and paintings depicting female world leaders in a lesbian orgy, a piece that challenges power structures and has generated significant discussion. Born in 1989 in Kabul, Afghanistan, Kubra has lived in exile in Paris since 2015. She paints the celebration of the female body in both a naive and provocative manner. "World women leaders" is one of the paintings from the "Bread, work and freedom" series (sold for 60,000 euros source: okdiario).

A quote from her: "We do not need men to feel pleasure or to govern the world."

ARCO2045: The future, for now

The curation under the name "ARCO2045: The future, for now" responds to a familiar ambition: art fairs want to be more than commercial marketplaces. It invited galleries and artists to think about future horizons and new creative languages. Let's not forget that the main source of revenue for this fair comes from high-net-worth individuals who are not immediately affected by the increasingly frequent crises and would prefer to keep it as is. Being aware through art is way better than being directly impacted.

The two curators of ARCO2045:

José Luis Blondet
Born in Caracas and lives and works in New York, and directs the education programs at the Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, New York.
(Which staff in 2022 voted to unionize under the issues of job precarity, poor working conditions, pay inequity, and pay well below a living wage. (source)

Magalí Arriola
Born in Paris, lives in México. Director and chief curator of the Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art (which glass façade was smashed and graffitied in 2025 by anti-gentrification protests) (source)

Art and fossil fuel

“Barrel of Rights” by Eugenio Merino, a work created just a few days ago, when the war in Iran broke out:

“Last Oil Barrel, date postponed” signed by Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck. How far can you push the irony? The artist creates small oil barrel sculptures from sustainable wood. The edition is unlimited. Each sculpture sells for the current market price of an actual oil barrel, a price that has climbed daily since the Iran war began.

“Last Oil Barrel, date postponed” signed by Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck. How far can you push the irony? The artist creates small oil barrel sculptures from sustainable wood. The edition is unlimited. Each sculpture sells for the current market price of an actual oil barrel, a price that has climbed daily since the Iran war began.

A memorial to burned forests

There's an interior design project for Arco's lounge: the selection is "350.000 hectares," an installation by Manuel Bouzas and an architectural group named Salazarsequeromedina. It uses wood recovered from last summer's wildfires in Galicia, aiming to transform a site of ecological trauma into a space for rest and reflection.

Profiles | Latin American Art

This section is curated by:

José Esparza Chong Cuy

Born in Mexico, lives in New York. He is the Actual executive director and chief curator of Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York.
"The world is going through a very difficult moment, and each country and each artist responds to their immediate social context from different artistic languages."
Profiles is about artists addressing issues such as violence, memory, indigenous heritage, labor, and ecosystems through distinct languages, ranging from conceptual art to indigenous craft. It focuses on presenting a single artist per gallery, for a total of eleven.

Two of them are:

Roberto Jacoby (Argentina)

Pioneer of conceptual art, showing works from the 1980s AIDS crisis. is an Argentine conceptual artist and sociologist. His practice examines mass media, communication networks, and social structures. He prioritizes social interactions and political action over physical artworks.

Previous ARCO Madrid editions