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I’ve just arrived back from a trip to Madrid with Cambridge School of Art and wanted to share with you some of my highlights - I will try to limit this so as not to overwhelm (I took a million photos), but you want a good look at all the art, right?! First some obligatory tourist shots of food, flags and fantastic graffiti!  The great thing about not being in charge of the itinerary is that I got to go to places and see art that I would never have chosen to see - a bredth of styles, medium and ages that has filled many gaps in my art knowledge and provided me with a whole new pool of research and inspiration for my own art. From the weird and wonderful 14th century triptychs of Museo del Prado to the quirky, vibrant lego pieces of the Contemporary Art Fair. Let me take you through each gallery, sharing my highlights and name dropping the key famous art pieces - click each gallery and artists for more info. Caixa Forum A renovated power station with a vertical garden and awesome staircase! An exhibition called 'Painting, an ongoing challenge', with themes of Aura, Monochrome, Enigmatic, Expressive geometry and Mutations, I really enjoyed the curation of this show. I was especially impacted by thse size of a lot of the art and Gerhard Richter has always been a favourite. Real Academia de Belles Artes (Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando) It was the variety of sculptures, and the eyes painted by Vincente Lopez Portana that drew me in this exhibition. There might have been some famous artists I could name drop but these were the stand out pieces for me in this place. Museo del Prado (the main Spanish national art museum) Goya, Velazquez and Rubens would be the names to drop in this gallery (to mention but a few) but my highlight was Hieronymus Bosch from the 14th Century. Who I had never met before and despite their age surprised me with how contemporary and modern they were.  The garden of earthly delights - Bosch  The Haywain Triptych - Bosch Museo Thyssen Bornemisza Many names to drop in this place - ones even I had heard of: Picasso, Miro, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Delauney, Degas, Toulouse Lautrec, Van Gogh, Renoir, Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Pollock, de Kooning, Ernst, not to mention the 2 solo shows of Joan Jonas and Rembrandt, and the whole floor I didn't even get to see. I realised that I was significantly drawn to a number of pieces not because of what they were about but because of how they made me feel (an important point to remember wrt my own art work) - with a few surprises like a Renoir, which would normally be too chocolate boxy for my taste but had an atmosphere it created that I found really special. Here are details of my top favourites - as my week in Madrid unfolded I was drawn to photograph close ups of pieces more than the whole as I felt it helped me identify with the artist and their artwork on a different level. Espacio Fundación Telefónica I've never been much of a fan of video art, either too weird and 'arty' (meaning low quality) or like a documentary, I don't want to sit in a dark room with headphones on wondering how long it's going to take! But the Joan Jonas exhibition above had begun to change my mind and I could see there was some potential that I might want to think about tapping into for my own work. This Bill Viola exhibition took things to a whole new level for me. Yes some of it was weird, yes it was in the dark and it was painfully slow - but that was the whole point, it was about the passage of time. As I applied a bit of patience, adjusted, left a piece and came back to see how it had changed, I found it really inspiring and profound.
This was an absolutely massive place full to the brim of a wide variety of modern artists and mediums. Being so large allowed for art work to really have space to breath, room for the gigantic and whole areas given over to installation art - from tails protruding from cupboard doors, to huge blocks of metal. I was most impacted by art with texture - several pieces made with concrete and plaster. Again this gallery could brag about exhibiting all the key names, including hosting Picasso's 'Guernica' which was kept under careful guard! But my favourite artist was the Spaniard Miguel Angel Campano who I'd not heard of before and was in a temporary exhibition. I found his scale and expression really exciting!
Velázquez Palace at Buen Retiro ParkThis was a solo show by Mario Merz (sculptor & painter) - pretty quirky with neon tubes and a variety of igloos. The most interesting part of this exhibition for me was that I learnt about the Fibonacci sequence (which his work was based on) - linked to the golden ratio maths equation that creates patterns found in nature (such as the fir cone, pineapple, curled fern leaves etc). ARCO International Contemporary Art Fair  The last day of our week in Madrid was spent exploring the art of 1350+ artists at this massive art fair and what a wonderful source of inspiration I found this! I had thought by this point in the week that I would have exhibition fatigue but not a bit of it, I'd just learnt to search out the work relevant and exciting to me and not worry about the rest! Of course for me colour and gesture were the biggest draws. Let me finish with a mash up movie of all the little videos I took, as sometimes photos just don't do the job! I was pretty daunted about going to Madrid, if I'm honest. I didn’t really know people booked on the trip (a cross section of different fine art courses) and am always a bit out of my comfort zone travelling (which my trip to America in October hasn't helped with!). However it was totally worth me facing my fears. I’ve made new artist friends and come home with a list of things to action just from the conversations and networking that took place. Madrid is a treasure trove of art - if you ever get a chance to visit, I highly recommend it!
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