BETA Contemporary
BETA Contemporary (Barcelona)
BETA Contemporary was founded in Berlin by Venezuelans in diaspora, with a focus on conceptually driven practices shaped by multiple cultural, geographic, and disciplinary contexts. From the outset, the gallery has supported artists working at the intersection of identity, medium, and place, encouraging critical risk-taking and sustained inquiry.
The program positions the gallery as a site of spatial and conceptual transformation. Artists are invited to develop projects in response to architectural, cultural, or historical conditions, exploring processes of translation, hybridity, and shifting creative frameworks. This results in a diverse range of practices, from installation and conceptual work to more materially grounded approaches.
Since relocating to Barcelona in 2024, BETA Contemporary has consolidated its international focus, with projects engaging questions of movement, memory, and contemporary modes of production. The gallery maintains a rigorous program shaped by migration and cross-cultural exchange, offering artists long-term support and contextual clarity.
In 2025, BETA Contemporary co-founded LENTA, an artist residency developed with Casa Pardal. LENTA supports experimentation and sustained research outside the pressures of commercial production. Each cycle connects urban and rural contexts and concludes with a presentation at BETA Contemporary and within the local community.
Proposal
Every practice has an origin, a point where thinking and making have not yet separated. The study is that point. It is not a rehearsal for something else, but the place where a practice reveals itself most directly, unguarded by the conventions a larger, more resolved work tends to acquire.
BETA Contemporary presents at SWAB 2026 a group of six artists, Juan Perdiguero Trillo, Miriam Dema, Manuela Benaim, Fernando Loyola, Madison Tyrrell and Maness, whose practices differ in medium, background and concern, but share the same source: the study as the origin of thought made visible.
A reduced format compresses decision-making, leaves no room for a gesture to hide inside scale, and asks the artist to resolve, in a few centimeters, what a larger surface would allow them to defer.
That scale also changes how the work is met. A small piece draws the viewer in physically, asks for a shorter distance and a longer look. It rewards the kind of attention a room-sized painting rarely requires, and offers a direct, almost intimate encounter with the artist’s hand at the exact moment a language is taking shape.
To present this at a fair is not incidental. The rhythm of a fair rewards work that reads instantly, from across an aisle, before it asks anything of the viewer. Addressing the study here, inside that rhythm, is a deliberate position: proof that rigor and depth are legible at any scale, and that presence does not require size.
The booth brings together small format works not as previews of something larger, but as complete statements in their own right, each one a point of origin. Together they form an installation that recovers the logic of the salon: accumulation, proximity, the friction between distinct languages sharing a single wall.
The diversity of mediums and subjects across the six artists is not meant to illustrate a catalogue of possibilities, but to show that experimentation, sustained at the source, is what allows a practice to grow.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1988, Fernando Loyola currently lives and works in Barcelona, Spain. His painting practice is driven by a self-directed exploration of color, form and materiality, prioritizing process over predetermined outcomes. Through abstraction, Loyola transforms emotional states, personal memory and spiritual inquiry into immersive visual landscapes where gestures, stains and layered transparencies become his primary language.
His compositions inhabit a space between the familiar and the unknowable, suggesting silhouettes and forms that never fully resolve into recognizable images. Working predominantly at a large scale, Loyola develops each painting through successive washes, overlapping colors and spontaneous interventions that create shifting depths and subtle tensions between opacity and transparency.
Rather than illustrating specific narratives, his paintings evoke emotional atmospheres where intuition and material experimentation coexist. By deliberately limiting his visual vocabulary, Loyola allows each work to emerge through an open dialogue with the medium, revealing the tactile qualities of acrylic paint while leaving the circumstances of its making intentionally elusive.
Loyola studied Graphic Design at the University of Buenos Aires and further developed his practice through workshops with artists including Luis Terán, Néstor Barrio, Duilio Pierri, Maggie de Koenigsberg and Valeria Maggi. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions with BETA Contemporary and Tramuntana Gallery and group exhibitions throughout Spain.
Born in Vancouver, Canada, in 1995, Madison Tyrell currently lives and works in Barcelona, Spain. Working primarily in oil painting, her practice explores the spiritual relationship between humans, nature and memory, creating dreamlike compositions where landscapes, architecture and transparent figures exist in quiet coexistence.
Influenced by the vast landscapes of Canada and the legacy of painters such as Lawren Harris, Emily Carr and A.Y. Jackson, Tyrell approaches painting as an intuitive process guided by observation, experimentation and transformation. Her works often begin with digital collages assembled from her personal photographic archive, which become the foundation for compositions that evolve through successive layers of paint, washes and erasures.
Balancing spontaneity with careful construction, Tyrell allows each painting to develop organically, embracing moments of uncertainty as part of the creative process. The resulting works evoke spaces suspended between reality and recollection, where traces of human intervention intersect with the rhythms of the natural world.
Through shifting perspectives and atmospheric compositions, her paintings invite viewers to reconsider the relationship between urban and natural environments, exploring how memory, place and perception continuously shape one another.
Born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1996, and currently living and working between Amsterdam and Barcelona, Manuela Benaim is a socially engaged multidisciplinary artist whose practice examines the human body as both subject and material, exploring the intimate, vulnerable, and often unspoken experiences that shape the human condition. Working across sculpture, performance, photography, and installation, she creates hyperrealistic silicone skins that become both material and metaphor, questioning the boundaries between self and other.
Central to her work is the process of life-casting, through which she collaborates with people of diverse ages, genders, races, and backgrounds. These artificial skins are transformed into sculptural and performative works that challenge fixed notions of identity, revealing the body as fluid, vulnerable, and shaped by cultural narratives. Through this displacement of the body, Benaim explores themes of gender, belonging, intimacy, and the tension between individuality and collective experience.
Using silicone, human hair, and pigment, Benaim recreates the surface of the body with meticulous precision, preserving fleeting moments of human presence. Her works invite viewers to reconsider the physical and conceptual limits of the body while reflecting on fragility, empathy, and the shared conditions that connect us despite our differences.
Working with volunteers of diverse ages, races and backgrounds, her practice reflects on individuality while emphasizing the connections that bind us. Benaim has participated in international residencies including Arsenal in Metz, Door Foundation in Amsterdam and TRANS with Ernesto Artillo in Spain, and has received recognitions such as the Rosalie Borowsky Belkin Award and the Florence Whistler Fish Award Honorable Mention.
Born in Aranda de Duero, Spain, in 1996, Juan Perdiguero Trillo lives and works in his hometown, where he is also an active member of the NVS collective. From an early age he was involved in the local graffiti movement, an experience that later led him to pursue a degree in Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca (USAL).
Juan Perdiguero Trillo is interested in the intersection and friction between established rituals and dogmas. Throughout his practice, he explores symbolism and color, drawing references from Iberian art, religious iconography, architecture, and his own memories and experiences. Friendship, unity, and the pursuit of freedom remain the central pillars of his work.
Miriam Dema (Barcelona, 1995) explores gesture, intimacy, and the subtle materiality of painting, treating the surface not as a neutral space but as a living extension of touch, presence, and memory.
Her most recent work deepens this reflection on care and proximity, approaching painting as a site of relation rather than representation. The compositions stem from precise yet intuitive line drawings that unfold into fields of color, texture, and rhythm. Material and gesture interact to create a visual language where perception and emotion are inseparable. Through this process, Dema examines how painting can register traces of experience and translate the immediacy of touch into form.
Throughout her trajectory, Dema has traced a continuum between daily gestures and emotional depth. Earlier works found intimacy in the rituals of the domestic sphere, and this vocabulary of everyday tenderness continues to resonate in her practice, now expanded toward the immediacy of contact and shared presence. Her paintings evoke the delicate balance between vulnerability and strength, revealing connection as both a physical and emotional state.
Maness (Andrés Mora Balzaretti, 1988) is a Mexican artist and filmmaker whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses film, sound, sculpture, and installation. Trained at the National School of Painting, Sculpture, and Printmaking “La Esmeralda,” the Superior School of Music, and the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (CCC) in Mexico, his work investigates how narratives shape collective memory and social imagination. His interest lies in expanding storytelling modes to examine how history and shared perception take shape.
Maness has received awards such as the Hans und Charlotte Krull Stiftung, the Recherchestipendium Bildende Kunst (Senate Department for Culture and Europe), Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg Experimental Film Funding, and the BPA//Production Grant. He currently lives and works in Berlin.
