Art Madrid'26 – VEGAP AT ART MADRID’19

Do you know the work and the different projects developed by VEGAP? This year, you will get to know first-hand the extensive work developed by Visual Entidad de Gestión de Artistas Plásticos (VEGAP): the organisation collaborates with the fourteenth edition of Art Madrid and will have a specific booth at the fair.

#Europeforcreators campaign.

As many of you will know, VEGAP is the organisation that has been managing intellectual property rights for visual creators in Spain for almost thirty years. Painters, sculptors, photographers, illustrators, designers, video artists, net artists and architects… all the visual creators. Currently, VEGAP represents more than 150,000 artists from 46 countries, provides cultural management services to a multitude of Spanish cultural institutions, as well as VEPGAP collaborates with the gallery sector, through the Galleries Associations, among others.

In addition to these tasks, VEGAP will present its Image Bank project: a huge catalogue of contemporary art images that offers all professionals related to the publishing, advertising, multimedia, television or audiovisual producers sectors, more than 60,000 exclusive images of the most representative artists of the contemporary creation. In a very fast and simple way, in the same and only management, the user obtains together the image, the license of use for the reproduction/distribution as well as the public communication of the work. This catalogue is exceptional because of the high technical quality of the images. Also, both the choice process and the treatment of the colour of the images has been supervised by the authors or, in any case, his inheritors.

The organisation is also in charge of the “Propuestas VEGAP” Competition, a contest conceived by artists to help artists. Born in 1997, on the initiative of the extinct Fundación Arte y Derecho, the main purpose of "Propuestas" is to stimulate visual creation by supporting the production and financing of artistic projects by visual creators. It is a unique contest of its kind, as it finances the creation and not the acquisition of works, of all branches of visual creation: plastic arts, photography, new forms of artistic expression, illustration and graphic design.

Throughout 22 editions, independent juries constituted by some of the most relevant artists of the Spanish scene, have distributed more than one million euros among around more than 300 artworks, making this contest one of the most artistic remarkable patronage projects of the cultural sector. The last year's award money was 50,000€ divided into 5 prizes, and the winners were the artists Nuria Güell, Ismael Iglesia, Diego del Pozo Barriuso, Clara Carvajal and José María Medina Manrique. The call for the 2019 edition will soon open.

Also, during the celebration of the fair you will be able to know the "Arte y Derecho" Collection, a publication edited by Trama. It was created in 2003 by Fundación Arte y Derecho and today is still managed by VEGAP. The publishing house, which has almost twenty titles, is specialized in two lines of research. On the one hand, you can find titles dedicated to legal issues, aimed at scholars and researchers of Copyright in their speciality authors of visual creation. With essays as enlightening as “Protección Jurídica de Videojuegos” (Francisco Javier Donaire y Antonio José Planells de la Maza, 2012), “Los creadores visuales ante la reforma de la Ley de Propiedad Intelectual” (Javier Moscoso del Prado, Alberto Bercovitz, Juan Antonio Xiol Ríos, Alberto Corazón y Javier Gutiérrez, 2007) or “Protección y límites del Derecho de Autor de los Creadores Visuales” (Antonio Delgado Porras, Alberto Bercovitz, Juan José Marín, Carola Streul, Javier Gutiérrez, Rafael Sánchez Aristi, Asunción Esteve Pardo, 2006),among others.

And on the other hand, there are other titles related to the essays on art that have been the subject of the different editions of the prizes of the "Escritos sobre Arte" Competition, also organized by the Fundación Arte y Derecho and which its name is given in Fundation’s memory. You can find thematic lines as suggestive as “Paracinema” (Esperanza Collado, 2012), “Iconoclasia, historia del arte y lucha de clases” (José María Durán Medraño, 2010), “Arte y Posfordismo” (Octavi Cameron, 2007) or “El montaje expositivo como traducción” (Isabel Tejeda, 2006).

Thus, the committed work of the VEGAP organisation, which has in the structure of its organizational chart great artists such as Antón Patiño, Montserrat Soto, Eva Lootz, Alfonso Albacete, Juan Genovés, Susana Solano, Chema Madoz or Esther Pizarro, among many others, will be promoted at the Art Madrid fair.

 


ART MADRID’26 INTERVIEW PROGRAM. CONVERSATIONS WITH ADONAY BERMÚDEZ


The work of Cedric Le Corf (Bühl, Germany, 1985) is situated in a territory of friction, where the archaic impulse of the sacred coexists with a critical sensibility characteristic of contemporary times. His practice is grounded in an anthropological understanding of the origin of art as a foundational gesture: the trace, the mark, the need to inscribe life in the face of the awareness of death.

The artist establishes a complex dialogue with the Spanish Baroque tradition, not through stylistic mimicry, but through the emotional and material intensity that permeates that aesthetic. The theatricality of light, the embodiment of tragedy, and the hybridity of the spiritual and the carnal are translated in his work into a formal exploration, where underlying geometry and embedded matter generate perceptual tension.

In Le Corf’s practice, the threshold between abstraction and figuration is not an opposition but a site of displacement. Spatial construction and color function as emotional tools that destabilize the familiar. An open methodology permeates this process, in which planning coexists with a deliberate loss of control. This allows the work to emerge as a space of silence, withdrawal, and return, where the artist confronts his own interiority.


The Fall. 2025. Oil on canvas.195 × 150 cm.


In your work, a tension can be perceived between devotion and dissidence. How do you negotiate the boundary between the sacred and the profane?

In my work, I feel the need to return to rock art, to the images I carry with me. From the moment prehistoric humans became aware of death, they felt the need to leave a trace—marking a red hand on the cave wall using a stencil, a symbol of vital blood. Paleolithic man, a hunter-gatherer, experienced a mystical feeling in the presence of the animal—a form of spiritual magic and rituals linked to creation. In this way, the cave becomes sacred through the abstract representation of death and life, procreation, the Venus figures… Thus, art is born. In my interpretation, art is sacred by essence, because it reveals humankind as a creator.


Between Dog and Wolf II. 2025. Oil on canvas. 97 × 70 cm.


Traces of the Spanish Baroque tradition can be seen in your work. What do you find in it that remains contemporary today?

Yes, elements of the Spanish Baroque tradition are present in my work. In the history of art, for example, I think of Arab-Andalusian mosaics, in which I find a geometry of forms that feels profoundly contemporary. In Spanish Baroque painting and sculpture, one recurring theme is tragedy: death and the sacred are intensely embodied, whether in religious or profane subjects, in artists such as Zurbarán, Ribera, El Greco, and also Velázquez. I am thinking, for example, of the remarkable equestrian painting of Isabel of France, with its geometry and nuanced portrait that illuminates the painting.

When I think about sculpture, the marvelous polychrome sculptures of Alonso Cano, Juan de Juni, or Pedro de Mena come to mind—works in which green eyes are inlaid, along with ivory teeth, horn fingernails, and eyelashes made of hair. All of this has undoubtedly influenced my sculptural practice, both in its morphological and equestrian dimensions. Personally, in my work I inlay porcelain elements into carved or painted wood.


Between Dog and Wolf I. 2025. Oil on canvas. 97 × 70 cm.


What interests you about that threshold between the recognizable and the abstract?

For me, any representation in painting or sculpture is abstract. What imposes itself is the architectural construction of space, its secret geometry, and the emotion produced by color. It is, in a way, a displacement of the real in order to reach that sensation.


The Anatomical Angel. 2013. Ash wood and porcelain. 90 × 15 × 160 cm.


Your work seems to move between silence, abandonment, and return. What draws you toward these intermediate spaces?

I believe it is by renouncing the imitation of external truth, by refusing to copy it, that I reach truth—whether in painting or in sculpture. It is as if I were looking at myself within my own subject in order to better discover my secret, perhaps.


Justa. 2019. Polychrome oak wood. 240 × 190 × 140 cm.


To what extent do you plan your work, and how much space do you leave for the unexpected—or even for mistakes?

It is true that, on occasions, I completely forget the main idea behind my painting and sculpture. Although I begin a work with very clear ideas—preliminary drawings and sketches, preparatory engravings, and a well-defined intention—I realize that, sometimes, that initial idea gets lost. It is not an accident. In some cases, it has to do with technical difficulties, but nowadays I also accept starting from a very specific idea and, when faced with sculpture, wood, or ceramics, having to work in a different way. I accept that.