The regional government acquires 'Self-Portrait with Beatriz' and 'Earrings', which will be exhibited at the Dos de Mayo Art Centre in Móstoles. The Navarre artist receives €15,000 and showcases her work at the Fernández-Braso gallery until 31 October.
The Community of Madrid has awarded the Apertura 2026 Award to Navarre artist Elena Goñi for her paintings Self-Portrait with Beatriz (2026) and Earrings (2025). The award is endowed with €15,000 and recognises the quality of the creators participating in Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend, the event with which the Association of Art Galleries of Madrid inaugurates the exhibition season every September for the past seventeen years, as reported by masdearte.com.
The two works will be acquired by the regional government and will enter the collection of the Dos de Mayo Art Centre (CA2M) in Móstoles. The decision was announced coinciding with the opening of the exhibition season in Madrid galleries.
The jury consisted of José Lebrero Stals, member of the Advisory Commission for the Acquisition of Works of Art of the Community of Madrid; Lorena Martínez de Corral, art historian and independent curator; María Asunción Lizarazu de Mesa, technician at CA2M; Tania Pardo, museum director; Juana Arana, advisor on Plastic Arts of the Department of Culture, Tourism and Sports; Asunción Cardona Suanzes, deputy director general of Fine Arts; and Manuel Lagos Gismero, general director of Culture and Creative Industries.
The exhibition featuring these pieces, titled Exhibition, can be visited until 31 October at the Fernández-Braso gallery in Madrid. It is Goñi's first solo show in this space, where the artist explores, through paintings created in the last two years, the relationships and dependencies between the artwork and the elements that make up the artistic ecosystem: the artist themselves, their environment, the studio, the gallery, and the viewer.
The collection includes landscapes, interiors, portraits, and self-portraits that transform scenes from real life and everyday acts into images of celebration and mystery. Art historian Estrella de Diego writes the accompanying text for the exhibition, noting that Goñi's spaces are more unsettling than the artist herself would admit.
I am not referring to those metaphysical spaces that, in their precision of rounded edges, constructed from chiaroscuro –barely folds of darkness and light– reproduce the threshold and the elements in a masterful and camouflaged way –which they also do. But because in them Goñi shapes a curious false sense of comfort that, indeed, places the artist in seemingly divergent universes that, nevertheless, belong to her without exception,” writes De Diego.
The Fernández-Braso gallery keeps the exhibition open to the public until 31 October.
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