The International Contemporary Art Fair Estampa 2025 opens its doors next week in Madrid and, as every year, will bring together the most outstanding galleries and artists from the national and international scene. In this edition, Marquesa Gallery participates with a stand that brings together four creators from different generations and languages: Santiago Serrano, Rubén Martín de Lucas, María Brzozowska and Claudia Alonso-Allende.
Our goal is to offer a diverse and stimulating journey through some of the most relevant proposals of our program, capable of dialogue with the present and of questioning the viewer from different perspectives.
Santiago Serrano: Days of Steel and Pink
The project presented by Santiago Serrano in Estampa, entitled Days of Steel and Rose, is part of a solid trajectory that has made it one of the great references of Spanish painting in recent decades. Serrano, whose career began in the seventies and has developed with a deep conceptual and formal coherence, returns to offer in this series an incisive reflection on our time.
Days of Steel and Rose starts from a tension that we all recognize: the contradiction between the apparent serenity of our daily lives and the rawness of what happens beyond our immediate scope. We live in environments where everything seems stable, friendly and bright, while in other parts of the world there are episodes of violence, wars, humanitarian crises and environmental catastrophes that rarely break into our routine directly.
In these paintings, Serrano combines the delicacy of pink – a symbol of fragility, tenderness and beauty – with the hardness of steel, a metaphor for the implacable and the violent. The series oscillates between the poetic and the dramatic, offering the viewer an aesthetic experience that, far from being complacent, opens a space of awareness.
Serrano’s work has never shied away from dialogue with history and with the tensions of his time. In Days of Steel and Rose, that lucidity unfolds with a mature pictorial language, where matter and color become metaphors for the contrasts of our society. A proposal that connects with global concerns without giving up the pictorial beauty that has always characterized its production.
Silenciarios y Quimeras Mixed media on canvas, wood and iron 124 x 253 cm. 2024
Rubén Martín de Lucas: GM Days
With a critical look at humanity’s relationship with nature, Rubén Martín de Lucas presents Transgenic Days, a project that articulates painting, text, and audio installations. His pictorial works, which we will see in Estampa, explore the artificiality of our times through symbols such as the domesticated grass, nuclear fungi, cages, modified foods or the figure of the wolf as an emblem of the indomitable.
Behind the apparent kindness of the images, the artist hides mattresses under the canvases, a metaphor for comfort that anesthetizes our perception of ecological and social problems. For Martín de Lucas, comfort is the great invisible enemy: that which makes us ignore the consequences of our actions, from child exploitation in mineral extraction to the environmental footprint of our daily lives.
In GMO Days, each work is a piece of a larger story: the story of a progressive departure from nature that questions our place in the world.
Bad wolf VIII 180 x 150 cm. Oil on canvas mounted on foam and wooden frame.2025
Maria Brzozowska: dreamscapes and metamorphosis
Maria Brzozowska’s pictorial universe moves between surrealism and daydreaming. His most recent series traces a map of dreamscapes in which the familiar becomes strange and the strange becomes familiar.
In his canvases, architecture breathes, objects float and symbols become metaphors for change. Elements such as hot air balloons, masks or theatrical scenarios generate an environment of transit, of interior and exterior displacement, where the trip is never physical but emotional and symbolic.
Brzozowska investigates the relationship between concealment and revelation, between stillness and movement, inviting the viewer to enter intimate spaces that function as rooms of the mind. His work provokes a playful disorientation, a state in which logic is suspended and the poetic becomes a tool of personal exploration.
Where the wind whispers 80 x 80 cm. acrylic on canvas. 2025
Claudia Alonso-Allende: between classic and abstract
Claudia Alonso-Allende’s proposal is part of an investigation on the perception and interpretation of images. His work establishes a bridge between classical and contemporary art through a singular technique: the “pixels” or rectangular brushes of color that fragment the representation and force the viewer to complete the image from their own experience.
Alonso-Allende is inspired by the great masters of the past, not from the copy, but from the reinterpretation. His works are not completely abstract or faithfully figurative: they are situated in an intermediate space where the subjectivity of the spectator takes on a central role.
With this series, the artist raises a reflection on how individual experiences shape our perception of the world and how art can become a catalyst for memories and emotions.
Palazzo Pitti 130 x 290 cm. Mixed media on canvas. 2024
Marquesa Gallery in Stamp 2025
The presence of Marquesa Gallery at Estampa 2025 reflects our commitment to a diverse artistic program, in which consolidated and emerging artists, critical and poetic proposals, figurative and abstract languages coexist. Our stand thus becomes a meeting point for those who seek to discover new perspectives on contemporary art.
We invite collectors, professionals and art lovers to visit us during the fair and to be surprised by the work of Santiago Serrano, Rubén Martín de Lucas, María Brzozowska and Claudia Alonso-Allende. Four different voices, but united by the same ambition: to explore, from art, the challenges and possibilities of our time.
[author _ rocio]