The Kings visit the EL MUNDO stand in Arco, a sample of the transformative potential of art

Their Majesties the Kings

have taken advantage of the inauguration of the 42nd edition of

, the International Contemporary Art Fair, to visit the EL MUNDO stand, located in hall 9 of Ifema.

They were

, director of EL MUNDO, and Maite Rico, content director of

, as well as by Marco Pompignoli, president of Unidad Editorial, and Stefania Bedogni and Nicola Speroni, general managers and directors of the Group.

Javier García Pagán, general director of the News Area, and Sergio Cobos, general director of Advertising, have also accompanied them on the visit.

Stand 9A 28 of the newspaper EL MUNDO and

in its commitment to

, pays tribute this year to the Basque artist Darío Villalba with the exhibition

.

"

for those of us who understand the process of social change as the concurrence of divergent, creative points of view that favor exchange above all else," said the director, Joaquín Manso, for whom Arco is "a very important event that we cannot miss".

The works chosen for the stand symbolize two different stages in Villalba's artistic production, defined by its audacity and sincerity.

The King and Queen have been especially interested in the diptychs that make up the piece

, a bicolor portrait of a young homeless man who reproduces different states of mind.

Felipe VI and Doña Letizia have asked their nephew and curator of the exhibition, Luis González de Castejón, about the meaning of said work and also about the encapsulation

.

"The selection of these works is very significant because it perfectly reflects what my uncle wanted to do throughout his entire career:

, whether they were homosexuals, the insane, prisoners or the homeless," explained González de Castejón.

The Kings and the authorities visit the stand of EL MUNDO.

Along with the Kings, some political leaders have also approached the EL MUNDO exhibitor, such as the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, the Mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, the Deputy Mayor Begoña Villacís, the delegate of the Area of Culture of the City Council, Andrea Levy, and the president of the Madrid Assembly, Eugenia Carballedo.

During their visit to Arco, all of them spent a few minutes talking with the representatives of Unidad Editorial.

Darío Villalba, great contemporary artist

By choosing Villalba, EL MUNDO intends to vindicate the name of those creators who are often reduced to the interest of specialists and are forgotten by the general public.

"The family is extremely excited that Darío is in Arco this year at the hands of EL MUNDO," said González de Castejón, who assures that his uncle would have been "extremely delighted" to have experienced it.

"His works by him have been present at the fair for other years, but they had never been in a space like this one."

Darío Villalba

belongs to a generation much later than the great masters of the Spanish avant-garde, but his ability to anticipate new trends allowed him to give life to a sincere work full of contradictions, in a constant balance between tradition and modernity.

"One of the most astonishing things about Darío's work is the contemporaneity that it embodies," said gallery owner Íñigo Navarro.

"Representations that were scandalous in their day have now opened a way to make visible the harshest parts of reality through art."

Born in San Sebastián in 1939, Darío Villalba grew up in a culturally cultivated environment and studied at the San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts.

During the sixties he exhibited his first works in said Madrid institution.

Since then, his work has traveled through the main museums and galleries in Europe and the United States, and has been recognized, among others, with the International Painting Prize of the Sao Paulo Biennial, the National Painting Prize in Spain or the Medal Gold for Merit in Fine Arts.

The Basque was, therefore, a

inside and outside our borders.

Villalba experimented with photography to give it a pictorial and sculptural character, and used it as an instrument when it came to subverting the hierarchy of plastic languages.

He came to create an archive with hundreds of his own images and taken from newspaper clippings of the time.

In the words of Manso, his "transgressive, non-conformist and out of the ordinary" look allowed him to capture "a latent social concern" that is highly valued today.

's tomato soup cans

Reflecting the dynamics of a consumer society and the debauchery of popular culture, Villalba's work focuses on the representation of the groups that make up counterhistory.

Warhol himself came to refer to the creations of Darío Villalba as "pop soul" art (pop with soul) in an exhibition in which both coincided in 1983.

The

, which this year celebrates its 42nd edition from February 22 to 26, is already one of the main events in the art market in Spain.

On this occasion, the Mediterranean Sea is the backbone of a program that brings together 211 galleries from 36 different countries with hundreds of collectors, mostly European and Latin American, in various professional meetings, forums and presentations.

In halls 7 and 9 you can find the works of, among other artists, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Antoni Tàpies, Chillida, Miquel Barceló, Sonia Delaunay, Dalí, Francis Bacon, María Blanchard and Richard Serra.

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