EXHIBITORS FOCUS LATAM 2025 – SWAB Barcelona Art Fair

VORTEX

Vortex unfolds from the Emerging Latam program, which over recent years has made visible emerging voices from Latin America at Swab. In this new phase, the project expands its reach towards a dialogue between young local projects and those from Latin America, intending to build new bridges between these two territories whose cultural landscapes have mutually shaped each other, sharing a back-and-forth of resonances, influences, and reinventions.

Co-curated by Santiago Gasquet, who has been responsible for the program during the last five editions, and Lena Solà Nogué, a Barcelona-based curator residing in Mexico who joins the project this year, Vortex proposes a shared occupation model: six spaces at the fair will be cohabited by twelve young galleries, six from each region.

This space becomes a meeting point for artists whose interests and lives circulate between here and Latin America, facilitating the creation of cultural networks that allow sharing of resources, issues, and strategies, contributing to strengthening concrete links between both scenes.

LIST OF EXHIBITORS

AFTERpoema (Buenos Aires) + Anywhere (Barcelona)

Ona Galería (Havana) + RaccoonProjects(Barcelona)

Proyectos Multiproposito (Mexico) + VASTO (Barcelona)

Salón Comunal (Bogotá) + BETA Contemporary (Barcelona)

Segismundo (Guatemala) + 200CENT (Barcelona)

Ungallery (Buenos Aires) + Casa Espacio (Barcelona)

AFTERpoema + Anywhere

-AFTERpoema is a gallery for emerging artists who merge visual arts with literature. The works create a universe that continues through the written word. Our artists approach art from diverse and disruptive trajectories and aesthetics, blending practices through materials and their connection to poetry, journals, and essays.

We explore new forms of representation and connection among artists, nature, landscapes, and other species on the planet. Our voices converge around shared themes: the natural world, sustainability, archive and memory, myths, utopias and dystopias, mysticism, spirituality, and esotericism.

-Anywhere takes its name from David Goodhart’s book, which describes the 21st-century dichotomy between “anywheres” and “somewheres.” Created by Marc Dentand (Naedt), an artist who entered art after a career in finance, the space continues his nomadic practice of forming informal artist communities in different cities to exchange ideas and reflect on art and society. After Berlin, he settled in Barcelona and in 2024 founded his studio, conceived as a place for discussion, presenting works, and selective gatherings, occasionally open to the public.

Proposal

The booth featuring Naedt and Médium (Paula Vicente Puiggros & Lu Martínez) proposes art as a way to inhabit the world—a mobile refuge, a language for movement, and a reinvention of home while in transit. Naedt’s modular geometries and isometric libraries hold memory, culture, and emotion. Médium unfolds sensory microecologies through ceramics, painting, and technology, crafting multispecies rituals and everyday fictions.

Geometric precision and organic textures don’t contrast—they converge in a shared search to turn lived experience into structures that offer shelter. Art becomes a way to map the present, where abstraction meets nature, and the technical blends with the ritual. A soft archive, a shifting territory, a home you can always return to.

Ona Galería + Raccoon Projects

-Ona Galería is a curatorial collective managed by Patricia García and Enzzo Hernández in Havana. It is an independent space focused on the co-creation and co-curation of emerging and contemporary art projects in Cuba, with an emphasis on the queer collective, sexual dissidence, the female perspective, and identity politics. Their work is based on a conscious selection of underrepresented voices, as well as a constant reflection on resilience and otherness.

-Raccoon Projects is an independent space in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat characterized by working through experimentation and dialogue with artists. Its practice focuses on the production of site-specific projects and the creation of new works that respond to space and context. In just a couple of years, it has become a meeting place for proposals exploring new materialities, questioning exhibition formats, and connecting with the local artistic community.

Proposal

Their work converges on themes of intimacy as an expanded territory, memory as material, and queerness as both a vital and political experience. Through their diverse practices, they challenge the boundaries between the personal and the collective, the body and history, and desire and the archive.

Thorrez’s emotional paintings, Nazábal’s intimate archives, and Viva’s Transición poética explore memory, care, and transformation, offering a space where queer identities and experiences can be both personal and collective. These works propose sensitive maps that resist homogenization, celebrating the power of intimacy and the potential of art to subvert and unite.

Proyectos Multiproposito + VASTO

-VASTO is an emerging art and collectible design gallery acting as a catalyst for contemporary culture, defining a common ground between a gallery, a home and a gathering space for those who seek to experience creation from a new prism.

-Proyectos Multipropósito is an independent platform in Mexico City dedicated to promoting curatorial and artistic projects. From experimental exhibitions to collaborations with artists, it seeks to generate critical dialogues and new narratives in contemporary art. It functions as a flexible space for creation, reflection, and the circulation of artworks.

Proposal

The joint proposal by PM and Vasto for Swab/Vortex 2025 brings together the sculptures of Berta Blanca T. Ivanow (Barcelona, 1992) and the paintings of Scott Galván (Guadalajara, 1998) in a dialogue around transformation. At the center, Ivanow’s clay sculptures evoke intimate, shifting forms—always open, never fixed. Surrounding them, Galván’s paintings depict urban and animal bodies in constant flux, echoing the ever-changing city. Their organic languages converge in a shared reflection on impermanence: what transforms, what erodes, what refuses to stay still.

Salón Comunal + BETA Contemporary

-Since its beginnings, Salón Comunal gallery has aimed to contribute to the circulation, exhibition, production, education, and commercialization of contemporary art, in response to the lack of institutional support for emerging artists in Colombia.

-BETA Contemporary is an art gallery founded in Berlin in 2020, now based in Barcelona. It represents artists with experimental, interdisciplinary practices, producing exhibitions and supporting contemporary art collections. The program fosters ambitious projects by local and international artists with a global outlook.

Proposal

BETA (Barcelona) and Salón Comunal (Bogotá) present a dialogue between Carlos Herraiz and Bernardo Montoya, two artists who approach painting as an expanded field of memory and material. Herraiz works with textiles, papers, and found objects, layering gestures of collection and care that blur the line between painting and performance. Montoya, by contrast, treats painting as geological accumulation, building dense, rock-like surfaces that expand into sculptural presence. Together, their practices reveal painting as a site of sedimented histories, where time, matter, and embodied memory converge.

Segismundo + 200CENT

–Segismundo opened its doors in December 2022 in Guatemala City with the group exhibition “Against All Odds,” a title that captures the spirit of the gallery. Named after the main character in Life is a Dream, the gallery seeks—through its artists and exhibitions—to establish a common ground of ideas and sensibilities from which narratives for the world to come can emerge.

– Since opening in 2023, 200CENT has expanded past a space that showcases artists’ projects and has stepped into the role of a “third place” which encourages communal building, learning, and exchange via artistic practices and conversations in the center of Barcelona. Open to all media and perspectives, 200CENT embraces diversity and encourages dialogue across disciplines. It offers a dynamic platform for artists to explore, question, and share their work in an evolving, inclusive environment.

Proposal

Bodies, detachment, connection, and emotion intersect in a shared terrain where materials become vehicles of expression. Robin Vuitch moves between textiles, installations, and painting to reflect on the absent body and exposed intimate moments. Ana Delgado Palomino works with gestures and surfaces, transforming material into acts of union and resonance that point toward connections beyond language. Inés Verdugo creates playful encounters in which everyday objects, loaded with memory, are reconfigured into symbolic forms, intertwining personal narratives with collective meanings.

The intersection of these three practices proposes spaces where bodies are both present and absent, fragile and dominant, opening a dialogue that unfolds between materiality, affect, and relation.

Ungallery + Casa Espacio

-UNGALLERY was founded in 2016 with the mission to present curatorial projects that go beyond the purely commercial in their exhibitions. It also aims to serve as a platform to showcase the work of artists from the country’s interior through regular exhibitions that bring them together. Contemporary art is its main focus, with special emphasis on including photography and video, as well as works by modern artists whose “timeless” relevance connects them to contemporary practices.

-Focusing on contemporary art exhibitions, Casa Espacio was founded on April 8, 2023, by Violeta Martínez and Juan Pablo Piñero. Its creation stems from an interest in generating new narratives and reflections through exhibitions and activities. It seeks to foster intercultural and interdisciplinary dialogue to create an organic impact that encourages individual and collective reflection. We work closely with emerging artists, mostly based in Barcelona, and collaborators from diverse origins, contexts, and beliefs, providing curatorial and artistic support to be shared in an inclusive and accessible space for all.

Proposal

As part of the Vortex Program, Ungallery presents the works of Argentine artist Florencia Echevarría, while Casa Espacio shares the proposal of Pablo Apolo and Violeto.

Nature appears as a common territory where languages, materials, and geographies converge. Echevarría addresses in her acrylic paintings the sacred hallucinogenic plants linked to healing and the divine in Indigenous cultures, and in her hybrid sculptures of “plant beings” she conceals, behind their delicate appearance, a critique of the mistreatment of the ecosystem through bases made of plastic waste collected from the Paraná River, in Rosario, her hometown.

These explorations dialogue with Apolo’s practice, who works with modeling clay, and with Violeto’s, who combines volcanic soil and metal. Through contrast and affinity, the three imagine a dual and complementary world where the organic and the constructed, the soft and the firm, intertwine in a sensitive intersection between the material and the collective.