Those who delight in contemporary drawing would be wise to check out the Cayon Gallery Madrid in Madrid, where they will usher fall in on September 16 with the presentation of the exhibition “The last Palazuelo” which presents more than 50 new works of Paul Palazuelo.

Now, you might be wondering why these works have never been seen before? In the last months of his life Palazuelo began working in an intense way, drawing everything that came into his head and left behind many small drawings that were less than 40 centimetres in size.

The artist, throughout his career, felt his drawings were quite important and in his last months of life he put a stronger emphasis on this aspect of his artistic production thanks to the “rigor of Solitude”, as he himself described it. At this time he began to draw not only familiar linear families of shapes for which he became known, but also new figures that he had once ignored.

This is what can be seen in “The last Palazuelo” which is what makes it such a historic exhibition. Nearly sixty drawings with new structures inspired by the analytical Cubism developed through the 70s will be on display. These drawings meld curved and closed forms, and some are in colour and sometimes others simply in black and white…

Palazuelo Paul, was born in Madrid in 1916 and died in the same city in 2007, is remembered for being one of the most influential Spanish artists of the second half of the twentieth century. “The last Palazuelo” will be held from September 16 to November and you can rent apartments in Madrid to attend the exhibition.



Mario Testino was born in 1954 in Lima, Peru, but in ’76 he moved to London where he continues to live, making books and portfolios for girls who wanted to be models. Little by little the artist discovered the world of fashion and began to become an in photographer.

Fashion has not been the sole focus of his work. Today’s success has allowed him to form part of large advertising campaigns with the most recognized apparel brands in the world, and mix with different sectors of the fashion world.

To realize the importance of a fashion photographer, it’s good to know who they have captured. The names that passed in front of Testino´s  lenses are some of the most recognized in the world of modelling and Hollywood: Naomi Campbell, Kim Basinger, Cameron Diaz, Janet Jackson, Nicole Kidman, Madonna, Keira Knightley, Kate Moss, Gwyneth Paltrow, Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, Lady Gaga, and on and on.

Madrid will enjoy its first exhibition featuring the Testino from the 21^st of  September onwards in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. “All or nothing”, will present 54 works that reveal not only the professional aspects of  the fashion photographer but also more personal aspects

“All or nothing” will excite your eyes with from models who show the best couture gowns and gorgeous naked celebrities- but all in good taste. These are the words of Peruvian photographer: “I like strong, independent women. Women, who despite their strength, never lose their femininity and do not use their beauty as an instrument. Women with personalities that may be a reflection of their wishes, and ours. “If you want to enjoy the work of Mario Testino at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum rent apartments in Madrid and see some of the most important fashion and photography.

Fields of the Nephilim is undoubtedly one of the most important and influential bands in the world of gothic rock and this year we are fortunate to have them in Spain twice, with concerts in both Madrid and Barcelona. But before we get down to the details of the concerts, let’s talk about the history and music of the band.

Formed in England in the second half of the eighties by the charismatic Carl McCoy, vocalist and founder of the group, they released their first album in 1987 under the name “Dawnrazor.” This sensual and dark disc would set the tone for the group’s future albums, which would go on to define what is meant by gothic rock.

Though different styles are classified under the umbrella of gothic rock, a common in both lyrics and in music is a dark and ominous tone. The band incorporates a vampire look inspired by western movies. The band’s aesthetics and music reflect McCoy’s creative inspiration which he draws from films, art and social imagination of diverse cultures. Thus, in the videos and photo sessions for the band, we see a “sinister cowboy” carried out with a ghostly intensity

The concerts dates are set for October 22 in Madrid. The concert will be held in one of the best venues around town as far as sound and infrastructure, which ensures an excellent show. This is excellent and unique opportunity to hear and see this magnificent live band. Rent your apartments in Madrid and come to enjoy the best music in the best environment in a city full of enchantments.

William Turner, who is nicknamed the “painter of light” for his deft skill, is one of the most controversial British landscape painters. Thought his works seem quite beautiful to us today, they were shocking during his era.

The exhibition, called “Turner and Teachers,” appeared earlier in the Tate Britain in London, England, and the Grand Palais in Paris, France. The idea of this presentation is to show how the artists gathered interpret different pictorial traditions. To be shown are no fewer than 40 works and paintings, by both him and the “teachers” who influenced him through his life.

The fact that “Turner and teachers” was also presented in other cities does not mean that there will not be something new. To give people an interesting addition, the Prado Museum included Turner’s latest paintings such as the “Shipwreck of a Cargo Ship,” “Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps”, “Snowstorm,” “Moses writing the Book of Genesis” or “Evening of the Deluge.”

This is not the only thing that draws attention to the exhibition. Among the people that influenced him were very great artists such as Rembrandt, Watteau, Claude Lorraine, Rubens, Willem Van de Velde and many others.

This interesting exhibition will be on display at the Prado Museum from now until September 19th and if you want to visit and enjoy not only William Turner but also other great artists, rent apartments in Madrid and don´t let the opportunity pass you by.

Many have heard of Alejandro Jodorowsky, an incredibly prolific artist who has excelled in disciplines as diverse as comics, literature, film, music and theatre. However, he is perhaps not as well known as for his role as therapist, as creator and sole master of a psychological and spiritual healing technique rooted in shamanism, psychotherapy and the mysticism of experimental writers like Gurdjieff and Castaneda. As Jodorowsky himself says, this therapy that is much closer to art than medical science; however, this doesn’t imply that it is not incredibly effective in many cases.

Psychomagic is based on the principle that to cure psychological or spiritual conflicts it is not enough to locate and name them as is done in traditional psychoanalysis: a psicomagical act, usually in the form of performance, should also be undertaken. In this way, the unconscious mind can react and symbolically solve the patient’s conflicts with a theatrical catharsis. The basic idea is that the unconscious does not understand the rational logic of words, but does respond to the chaos of dreams, art and imagination … For example, one way to overcome a pathological fear of one’s father would be facing an actor dressed as the father and beat him in a symbolic struggle … A Krishnamurti phrase reflects one of the main bases of the psychomagic technique: “Do what you fear and the fear will die.”

Jodorowsky created some controversy years ago by claiming that only he and his son Christopher were able to exercise psychomagic therapies, but with the passage of time that assertion has proven wrong, and there are extremely capable people who can evaluate people and recommend psychomagical actions. In Madrid there are sometimes workshops and seminars offered on psychomagic technique, however, they are not offered on a fixed schedule and often they are given with very little advance warning … The best way to find news of upcoming events is to go to Jodorowsky´s official website (in the ClubCultura page on the FNAC website). There, you can find some common meeting places (such as the Arunda Veryeni cultural association), my recommendation is to rent apartments in Madrid and get involved…

On September 16, an interesting exhibition that explores through the sensitive and watchful eye of French photographer Laurent Zylberman opens at the Rita Castellote gallery in Madrid. It will explore the meeting of two profoundly different cultures, following the occupation of Tibet by China.

The exhibit is simply and clearly entitled “Tibet”, and features documentary photographs, about the unusual, sometimes funny and sometimes violent clashes which occur in a region inundated by immigrants and the shows the impact of the seductive “Made in China” consumerist mentality has on the totally opposite Tibetan spirituality.

In 2008, Zylberman and fellow journalist Eric Meyer are among the few Westerners granted permission to enter the region of Tibet with official authorization to make a report. Their collaboration shows a reality about which previously we could only speculate on, marked by high surveillance and the ubiquitous presence of the Chinese.

However, we also find images that show evidence that Tibetans remain firmly entrenched in their ways and beliefs, strong even before the imposition of a materialistic value system which is marked by the desire for an economic future. And so we see a rapidly developing Tibet, a region in constant work, which increasingly resembling China with airports, roads and irrigation systems … with clubs that seduce young Tibetans with Western music.

And so the latent promise of progress marches forward, but we must keep in mind that it is a dubious achievement, which advances at the rhythm of Chinese greed, and discredits the ancient cultural identity, which has shaped the lives of generations of nomads in Tibet.

Rent apartments in Madrid, and witness the rich culture to be found in the city’s galleries, and do not miss the opening of this impressive exhibition to be held in the Rita Castellote Gallery.

Each year, Caja Madrid sponsors a contest entitle “Never-seen-before” to encourage the next generation of curatorial projects. With the idea of supporting contemporary art, each year this program gives young curators an attempt to advance the processes that stand for innovation, quality content and the ability of projects to adapt to existing resources.

All this began in 2002 and since then it has attracted a huge number of participating projects, and making it a referential competition for young artists today.

Three winning projects were chosen this year. The first, “Dark and Wild” was curated by Edu Hurtado is a curatorial research project that establishes the “forest” as a metaphorical territory of desire and rage. A space that reflects on violence, conceived as inherent to human beings and it serves also as an excuse to thoroughly analyze the patterns of control of the prevailing value system.

The second work is carried out under the name “Everything is out there” and Rosa Lleó y Zaida Trallero. This work is related to the repetition of images and objects from the past and how they are interpreted from a continuous present.

” Zines”, curated by Roberto Vidal and Oscar Martin, is the third of these jobs and tries to reflect what is happening in the contemporary publishing establishment at the level of independent publications, how it relates to the field of artistic production and social, cultural and political currents . The three projects will be visible to all visitors to apartments in Madrid in rooms A, B and C of La Casa Encendida and can be seen until August 29th.

The show “Manhattan, mixed use: Photography and other artistic practices from 1970 to the present ” will run until Sept. 27 as part of PhotoEspaña 2010 The exhibit is organized by the de National museum of art the Reina Sofía, curated by Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp and it can be found 4th floor of the Sabatini building.

The exhibition’s title refers to zoning and land use, and in particular neighbourhoods or buildings in which there is a combination of commercial and residential functions, which is common in New York. This transformation started in the 70s and legalized a de facto situation in which the artists had appropriated factories and warehouses in partially de-industrialized areas for use as studios and living spaces.

This shift generated real artistic communities and eventually turned Soho into the epicentre for contemporary artists and art galleries. Rapid gentrification mixed with artistic flow brought galleries, restaurants and spaces for performances to the area.

The exhibition includes more than 20 artists among them Alvin Baltrop, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Dara Birnbaum, Jennifer Boland, Stefan Brecht, Matthew Buckingham, Tom Burr, Roy Colmer, Moyra Davey, Terry Fox, Bernard Guillot, David Hammons, Sharon Hayes, Peter Hujar, Joan Jonas, Louise Lawler, Zoe Leonard, Sol LeWitt, Glenn Ligon, Robert Longo, Vera Lutter, and Danny Lyon.

Photographers like David Wojnarowicz and Peter Hujar began firing their cameras on the streets where they lived and moved, while artists like Gordon Matta-Clark or Joan Jonas or editor/gallery owner/ curator Willoughby Sharp were attracted by immense unregulated and blocks of abandoned buildings near areas that had been demolished to build the World Trade Center and Battery Park City and nearby Hudson River piers.

Bernard Guillot, like many foreigners who visited the city at that time was fascinated by the solitude and the clandestine activities hidden in those spaces. While Guillot was concentrated on the West Side and in particular at 12th Avenue, Thomas Struth, came from Germany and gravitated towards the desolate streets of Manhattan and its neighbourhoods.

There are also audiovisual works such as Static (2009), a digital projection of by the British artist Steve McQueen, consisting of seven-minute loop which features a camera moving in a spiral with a soundtrack, where there was intermittent incessant hum of the helicopter. Glenn Ligon, one of the few artists in this exhibition who was born and raised in the city, provides a very personal view on Manhattan with an almost laconic textual tour of the various apartments where he lived during four decades, charting his relationship with this space.

Enjoy the summer in Madrid apartments, take a walk down to the Reina Sofía Museum and enjoy the images and sensations of another great place, Manhattan.

The Film series “Through the Looking Glass” is dedicated to connecting the written work of Lewis Carroll to films. Films by Federico Fellini, Michel Gondry and Raul Ruiz will all be shown this summer as part of the cycle in La casa encendida in Madrid, taking advantage of the vacation time to pull together high quality film programming.

The series is entitled “Through the Looking Glass” because it seeks to find traces of the legacy of writer Lewis Carroll in a number of films which like his works, lead us to a universe governed by laws that are anything but logical. These dazzling imaginary worlds are full of dreamlike and hallucinatory scenes. Their forms create new codes beyond the obvious reality, whose imaginary spaces have informed modern literature and the arts in general, as well as film.

Artists such as Jean Cocteau, Federico Fellini and Michel Gondry have explored through their films the possibilities and virtues of these dream-like images. Others, like Jacques Rivette, Peter Weir, Takeshi Miike and Raul Ruiz, have managed to transgress the boundaries of what is reasonable and credible. Filmmakers like Luis Buñuel and Louis Malle, have used these techniques of illusionism and surrealism to mock stupidity and human pride.

For the month of August three of these great artists will have their work presented as part of this cycle.

Michel Gondry´s amazing 2007 film “The Science of Sleep”, film starring Gael García Bernal, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Alain Chabatque will be presented on August 14th at 22:00.

The following week the focus will turn to one of the greats of Italian cinema, Federico Fellini with a film starring his beloved Giulietta Masina. Save the date for the 21st of August.

The last session of the series, August 28th, features the “The Comedy of Innocence,” directed by the exiled Chilean director Raul Ruiz who since discovering a home in Paris in the 70´s has become a fundamental reference for French art cinema. The film stars Isabelle Huppert, Jeanne Balibar, and Charles Berling and depicts a dream that film-loving visitors to apartments in Madrid can’t afford to miss!

Looking for apartments in Madrid I spent a lot of time on the subway. It is a showcase of life, and if you look closely, you can see behaviours that make you smile and think at the same time. The other day:

A guy was hanging on to the central bar of the metro car where I sat, looking around. At the stops people got on, including a girl who had that special look that confident women usually have, when they know a desirable sexuality emanates from all sides. She wore tight jeans and a black shirt which marked all her curves and showed off a bright fuchsia bra. Her gorgeously smooth long black hair and big black sunglasses gave her an aura of exotic mystery and elegance…

The guy beside me stared her up and down, boldly, nary a whisper of shame or shyness… she pretended not to notice, but was obviously aware of the effect she was having on him as she peeked at his reflection in the car windows.

At the next station up, more people, including a beautiful and elegant woman, with stylish, designer clothes and a sweet face care, entered the car. This refined woman checked out the guy, but received nary a glance back in her direction. This woman, who would undoubtedly be everything his mother could want for him, didn’t set off his fantasy meter in the slightest, though he continued to fantasize about the brunette…

When the first woman prepares to leave, the man stood just behind her, frozen with desire and frustration, looking like a bullfighter facing the bull and about to loose.

They get off, her first, and then just a few steps behind, the man. Was he following her? Would they disappear into the nearest café bathroom together? … I don’t know, the door shut and they receded into the distance as the train moved on. I looked at my companion and he asked if I had seen the spectacle?

Though we are subjected to social norms, sometimes we feel that one can see the raw nerve exposed that triggers our animal instincts which years of evolution have not been able to erase. Not everyone sends out obvious signals… but sometimes I think in the solitude of the big city everyone is looking for something else.