Patricia Gadea: Galería Mari Boom | Madrid

“In the afternoon, we took the papers we had painted in the studio, pasted them up, and finished them on site with spray paint. That evening, a friend brought a cooler full of beers, and we opened the gallery. People came looking for a conventional gallery and instead found an exhibition in an underground passageway.” - Juan Ugalde

Mari Boom Gallery was an alternative exhibition space founded in Madrid in 1985 by artists Patricia Gadea, Juan Ugalde, José Maldonado, Manolo Dimas, and César Fernández Arias. Located in an underground passage near Retiro Park, it emerged outside the commercial and institutional art circuits as a self-managed project dedicated to artistic experimentation.

The gallery was created out of a desire to establish an independent exhibition space at a time when many young artists struggled to gain access to galleries and museums. Mari Boom championed a collective and critical artistic practice, conceiving the exhibition as an extension of the creative process itself and as a means of intervening in the urban environment.

The gallery's name was an ironic reference to the American gallerist Mary Boone, an emblematic figure of the international art market during the 1980s. By appropriating and playfully recasting her name in a distinctly Spanish form, its founders asserted an approach to art that distanced itself from commercial imperatives and instead embraced creative freedom, collaboration, and experimentation.