OPEN BILBAO 2026 EDITION
21 April 2026
A map of contemporary printmaking: OPEN Portfolio expands its international reach
The 13th edition of OPEN Portfolio has closed its call with more than one hundred applications from over twenty countries. This is not a secondary figure: it is, rather, a way of measuring a tension that repeats and expands with each edition.
OPEN Portfolio was born as a meeting point for emerging artists working in printmaking, but over time it has evolved into something closer to a map in motion. A map that is not drawn from stability, but from the accumulation of practices, languages and trajectories that intersect without ever fully settling.
This year, that map extends across cities in Spain — Madrid, Valencia, the Basque Country, Granada, Seville, Salamanca, Vigo — and reaches into Latin America, with proposals from Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, Panama and Venezuela. It also spans Europe — Poland, Italy, Belgium, Croatia, Ukraine, Germany, Portugal, Switzerland, Serbia — as well as other contexts such as Morocco, Iran, Syria and China.
What matters is not so much the list itself, but what spills beyond it. The proposals do not respond to a single register or to a single idea of what printmaking is. Artists in training coexist with established careers; traditional techniques — intaglio, screen printing, lithography — sit alongside approaches that no longer seek to fit into fixed categories, but rather to displace them.
This overlap is not a side effect of the project: it is its core.
From here, the selection process begins. A jury will review each application to select the 14 artists who will take part in the 13th edition of OPEN Portfolio, to be held at Sala Rekalde in Bilbao from 12 to 14 June 2026.
Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to develop and shape their proposals within this framework. What has been received this year not only broadens the project’s reach: it confirms that contemporary printmaking remains a territory in dispute, in expansion, and above all, in conversation.