The Best Shows to See During ARCO Madrid 2025

Tarek Atoui | TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary | 18 February – 18 May

Franco-Lebanese sound artist Tarek Atoui has transformed the spaces of the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum into a series of majlis (salons of hospitality in North African and Middle Eastern cultures) that immerse viewers into Amazigh and Arab music and craft traditions, embodying the artist’s three years of collaboration with musicians and artisans in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. Titled At-Tāriq (Morning Star, 2025), the work features five listening stations playing archival recordings of performances and recitals mixed with contemporary electronic music to create a rousing soundscape that reimagines the geographical entity of Tamazgha – the Indigenous home of the Amazigh people. The space also presents a selection of musical instruments such as doun-douns (drums made from wood, cowhide and rope) and specially commissioned works of bronze, ceramic, textile and stone by the region’s craftspeople.

Carlos Aires| Sabrina Amrani | 28 February – 12 April

Madrid-based artist Carlos Aires’s new solo show holds us accountable for our desensitized perception of the violence and injustice we witness daily on our screens. In The End: A Love Song (2025), Aires taps into consumerism and capitalist greed by spelling out the lyrics of The Doors’ 1967 track ‘The End’, through a multitude of miniature paper cut-outs of banknotes in circulation from the world’s 30 richest countries. Nearby, the triptych Mirrors (2025) features another vast collection of tiny cut-outs: black silhouettes of conflicts and disasters – including the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and the recent flooding in Valencia – alongside cultural references ranging from fairy tales to pornography. The exhibition’s eponymous installation, BLIND (2025), comprises 2,500 miniature paper lanterns made from newspaper photographs documenting historic catastrophes, from the Spanish Civil War to Nazi Germany. The work’s lights illuminate the space, but suddenly cut out every few minutes, plunging the viewer into darkness and urging them to reflect on what is and isn’t visible.

Grada Kilomba | Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía | 20 November – 31 March

Decolonial artist Grada Kilomba sharply interrogates imperialist knowledge systems by bringing erased Black histories to the fore. Table of Goods (2017) features clumps of cocoa, coffee and sugar buried in a pile of soil, representing the products exploited by European colonial trade and produced through slave labour, while 18 Verses (2022) includes pieces of wood engraved with poetry about the enslaved people transported from Africa across the Atlantic, millions of whom died on the journey. Particularly poignant is the video installation Opera to a Black Venus (2024–ongoing), in which a group of performers hums a repetitive, single-note tune while holding the viewer in a fixed gaze, some breaking into contemporary dance, as a ritual of memorialisation and healing. Just as the Roman goddess of love was mythically born from the sea, the imagined Black Venus of Kilomba’s work asks audiences what stories might emerge from the bottom of the ocean that bore the Middle Passage.

Jorge Pardo | Galería Elba Benítez | 1 March – 30 April

Blending the architectural with the aesthetic, Cuban-American artist Jorge Pardo is known as much for his large-scale public interventions and interiors of lavish residences as for his museum and gallery displays. His eclectic Madrid show presents a new body of drawings and vivid paintings, all untitled, made using acrylic markers, their surfaces scored to create a textured effect. Alongside, a series of untitled sculptural lamps – made of enamel, birch and aluminium – radiate colourful light through their cocoon-like shapes. The exhibition’s highlight is a site-specific ceramics installation occupying an entire room of the gallery and featuring the artist’s characteristically dream-like abstract and geometric patterns. 

Tiffany Chung | Max Estrella  | 22 February – 12 April

In her first solo show in Spain, Vietnamese-American artist Tiffany Chung uses painting, drawing, embroidery and audiovisual installation to chart the global trajectories of trade and migration, delving into historical displacement and interconnectedness. Her map-making project Global Spice Trade: routes from ancient time to the age of exploration/exploitation (2024–25) explores the complex history of the spice trade that connected East to West for more than three millennia, both shaping and shaped by commerce and colonialism. Studies of exotic botanical organisms and spices from the ends of the earth in quest of market dominance (2024–25) exemplifies this further by pairing hand-embroidered linen works depicting spices and plants with their physical counterparts displayed in glass jars.

Pol Taburet | Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo | 5 March – 20 April 

For its annual exhibition in Madrid, the Turin-based foundation seeks out unusual spaces around the Spanish capital. This year, a disused 1950s pavilion in the Casa de Campo park, constructed from hexagonal, umbrella-shaped modules, will be filled with paintings and drawings by Parisian artist Pol Taburet. Known to draw from elements related to his Caribbean heritage, Taburet leans into the region’s mystical traditions through the inclusion of spectral sitters in works like Desire and stones and The ones that hide (both 2025). His new body of impressionistic work also includes paintings such as Perfumed dress and goat clogs and That’s the Needle guy! (both 2025), which depict unsettling figures that metamorphose between humans, animals or otherworldly forms. The overarching dark, eerie palette is inspired by Francisco de Goya’s ‘Black Paintings’ series (c.1820), placing the Spanish master’s disturbing visions in dialogue with Taburet’s own ghostly figurations.

Miquel Barceló | Galería Elvira González | 29 January – 29 March

Miquel Barceló’s visceral vision reverberates through the works exhibited in a new show dedicated to his childhood in Mallorca and his decades-long fascination with bullfighting. Encircled in primary reds and yellows, paintings such as La línea del sombra (The Line of the Shadow, 2024) portray matadors performing the gory and divisive Spanish tradition. In the adjacent room, gesturally painted canvases featuring wildlife scenes, such as L’appât (The Bait, 2024), sit alongside various ceramic casts, including some of the artist’s own face (Autoportrait oreiller de pierre, Stone Pillow Self-Portrait, 2024). A selection of bowls and vases illustrates how Barceló applies his bold, painterly expressiveness to the medium of clay – look out for the sea creatures in Órfico con cangrejos (Orphic with Crabs, 2024) and the horses in Kinescope (2021).

_{Main image: ‘Jorge Pardo’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: Jorge Pardo and Galería Elba Benítez, Madrid; photograph: © Oak Taylor Smith}