Pradiauto Gallery in Madrid
Chamartín · Contemporary programme
Editorial Profile
Pradiauto operates within Madrid’s contemporary art landscape as a hybrid, artist-driven platform that moves between exhibition-making, publishing, and discursive formats. Situated in Chamartín, slightly removed from the more saturated gallery clusters, it positions itself less as a conventional commercial space and more as an experimental node where curatorial structure remains deliberately fluid. Its program tends to privilege process over fixed outcomes, often foregrounding research-based practices, collaborative formats, and evolving exhibition frameworks that resist easy categorization. In this sense, it aligns with a broader tendency visible across contemporary art in Madrid, where smaller-scale initiatives contribute to a decentralized and heterogeneous scene rather than reinforcing a single dominant geography.
The exhibitions and projects presented typically engage with conceptual, performative, and installation-based practices, frequently extending beyond the gallery space through publications, talks, or off-site interventions. Rather than maintaining a rigid roster, the program appears to shift according to specific curatorial inquiries, allowing for a degree of responsiveness that distinguishes it from more market-oriented structures. Within the context of galleries in Madrid, this approach situates the space closer to artist-run and research-driven initiatives, where exhibition-making functions as a testing ground for ideas rather than a finalized product. Its role is therefore less about visibility in a commercial sense and more about sustaining a discursive layer within the city’s ecosystem, contributing to the ongoing negotiation between independent production and institutional frameworks that defines Madrid’s contemporary art field.
Selected Artists
Esther Merinero
Spanish
Madrid-born artist working with resin, found objects, and speculative materiality. Her practice investigates everyday phenomena—puddles, stains, accidental forms—as portals into questions of love, fragility, and the power of ordinary encounters.
Karolina Dworska
Polish
London-based Polish artist working primarily through rug-tufting and sculpture to construct surreal dreamscapes populated with uncanny figures. Her practice draws on mythology, folklore, and science fiction to explore the boundary between unconscious fantasy and corporeal reality.
Gabriel Alonso
Spanish
Madrid-based artist and researcher whose practice traverses installation, sculpture, and photography to interrogate the boundaries between nature and culture, the real and the imagined, through a framework of postnatural aesthetics and political ecology.
Lina Lapelytė
Lithuanian
Vilnius and London-based artist and composer whose performance-based practice roots itself in music to critically examine gender norms, collective voice, ecology, and nostalgia—often involving untrained performers. Co-creator of Sun & Sea, winner of the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.
Michael Dean
British
Newcastle-born artist whose immersive sculptural installations begin with personal writing, which he translates into human-scale concrete and steel forms. His work interrogates language, intimacy, class, and socio-political inequality, earning him a Turner Prize nomination in 2016.
Elisa Pardo Puch
Spanish
Madrid-born artist whose practice explores language, materiality, and the representational structures underlying Western thought, developed through exhibitions across Spain and international residencies including GlogauAIR Berlin and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
Selected Exhibitions
Hot Links
Gabriel Alonso, Lucía Bayón, Esther Merinero, Rafa Munárriz, Elisa Pardo Puch, Víctor Santamarina
The inaugural exhibition of Pradiauto, bringing together six Madrid-based artists whose practices share an interest in materiality, urban processes, and the transformation of everyday objects and spaces.
De Oro en su Núcleo (Gold at Its Core)
Esther Merinero, Lina Lapelytė, Alejandro Villa-Durán, Frederik Nystrup-Larsen
A curated group exhibition departing from shared links at London's Royal College of Art, bringing together four artists whose work navigates nature, magic, history, and the fragility of contemporary subjectivities.
Far Away From Anywhere Else
Gabriel Alonso
A site-specific project at La Mosca, Madrid, presenting a mutant ecosystem of sculptures and materials—soil, resin, water, branches—that respond to environmental and chemical change, interrogating human attempts to control and preserve life.
Harp and Throat
Gabriel Alonso, Vica Pacheco
A two-person exhibition taking its title from Inuit throat songs, in which Alonso's counter-cartography sculptures and Pacheco's sound-based work converge around navigation, ritual, and humanity's relationship to uncertain landscapes.
Transformer
Alberto Feijóo Rodríguez
A solo exhibition by the Alicante-based artist exploring the materiality and spatial possibilities of photography, presenting images liberated from two-dimensionality through three-dimensional display formats and sculptural arrangements.
Storytellers
Gabriel Alonso
Alonso's second solo presentation at Pradiauto, featuring mostly sculptural works that oscillate between destruction and growth, drawing on the legacy of Georgia O'Keeffe to explore the industrial, the natural, and the collective memory of the garden.
Heart Keeper
Esther Merinero
A solo exhibition in which Merinero returns to recurring themes of love, fantasy, and fragile connections, presenting resin and mirrored objects that speculate on the capacity of things to store, protect, and give new life to feeling.
Explore Madrid
Three ways of reading the contemporary art landscape of Madrid.
