ARCOmadrid 2023

RocioSantaCruz focuses on artworks that relate artistic creation with the strategies of power and the control it exercises over a production.

The presentation is based on Aby Warburg’s concept of ‘Pathosformeln’, a key idea of the German historian, which points to the set of visual elements that are repeated and appeal to the imagination of a cultural community, giving them a significant value and establishing a dialogue between the iconographic tradition of the past and the present. The proposal includes works by Rosa Amorós, Mar Arza, Blanca Casas Brullet, Jean Denant, Gonzalo Elvira, Teresa Gancedo, Lluís Hortalà, Marina Núñez, Diogo Pimentão, Toni Amengual and Oriol Vilapuig, as well as a selection of unpublished photographs by Colita.

RocioSantaCruz pays a special tribute to Ouka Leele (Madrid 1957 – Ibidem 2022), with a suite of 13 vintage photographs in silver gelatin, showing the exquisite language of contrasts and textures conveying an elevated narrative. The universe of an artist who was the creator of a playful and inventive poetics and unbridled creativity.

In conjunction with the booth proposal, RocioSantaCruz will present a Solo Project by ORLAN from the series Weeping women are angry, exhibited at the Picasso Museum in Paris in 2022. In this series of hybrid photographs, ORLAN brings to light women who are in the shadows and questions the position of women in the contemporary artistic sphere, interrogating the status of the body through all cultural, political, traditional and religious pressures.

This presentation was carried out with the support of