Gabriela Bettini: Calculadora de Derrotas at Sabrina Amrani, Madrid — Painting Rivers, Old Maps and Deep-Sea Corals

In Spanish, a derrota is a ship’s course — and also a defeat. Gabriela Bettini builds an entire exhibition on that double meaning. Gabriela Bettini: Calculadora de Derrotas at Sabrina Amrani, Madrid opens on 14 November 2026 and runs until 13 February 2027 in the gallery’s Carabanchel space. It is her third solo show with the gallery, and perhaps her most ambitious attempt yet to make landscape painting carry history, ecology and doubt at once.

A painter between Madrid and the Río de la Plata

Bettini, a Spanish artist of Argentinian origin, was born in Madrid in 1977. She studied Fine Art at Leeds Metropolitan University and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, took a master’s at the Complutense and a further MA in Fine Art at the University of East London. Her work is in the collections of the Museo Reina Sofía, CA2M, Colección Jumex, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and DKV, and she has received the DKV Prize, Fundación Banco Santander’s “Derivada” award and a residency grant at the Spanish Academy in Rome. Recent solo exhibitions include Domus Artium 2002 in Salamanca (2026), and she has taken part in BIENALSUR in Brasília and Rabat.

At Sabrina Amrani her earlier shows carried titles such as Topografía del Borrado (Topography of Erasure, 2020) and Raíces Secundarias (Secondary Roots, 2022). The vocabulary is telling: maps, erasure, roots. Bettini’s painting has long treated landscape as a document that can be falsified, edited or lost.

A map held down with tape

The exhibition text, written by Mabel Tapia, begins with a small painting of an eighteenth-century map of the Río de la Plata basin. Bettini reproduces not only the cartography but the traces of its publication — a river name in French, details of the original edition — and paints the map as if fixed to the wall with adhesive tape. The trompe-l’œil tape is a quiet but decisive gesture: it drags the historical document into the present tense and reminds us that maps are objects made by someone, for someone.

The title comes from the calculadora de derrotas, an eighteenth-century navigation instrument associated with the Marquis of La Victoria. Tapia’s text sets it against today’s route-finding tools, from intuition to artificial intelligence, and asks whether any such calculation can account for the losses carried by water and the life it holds.

Living landscapes: Río, Niebla, Humedal

Most of the show consists of landscapes in painting and charcoal, some of them small. Their titles read like a field notebook — Río, Niebla (Fog), Nieve (Snow), Humedal (Wetland), Lago, Litoral, Olas (Waves) — alongside an extended series, Memoria del agua, numbered I to XXII. The text calls them living landscapes: images that resist becoming fixed views and carry traces of ecological, political and social violence. Through them Bettini reworks the inheritance of modernity, in which landscape painting so often served as a tool of possession.

Painting creatures no one had seen

The second strand is unexpected and striking. In 2025 an expedition led by Argentina’s research council, CONICET, explored the Mar del Plata submarine canyon; according to the exhibition text it recorded around forty new species and an unexpected diversity of cold-water corals. Working from the expedition’s ultra-high-definition images, Bettini paints these creatures. Tapia frames the gesture carefully: painting here gathers rather than appropriates. It is the opposite of the colonial specimen drawing — a portrait of life at the edge of knowledge, made with humility.

The essay closes on a question that doubles as the show’s thesis: “Can courses ever truly be calculated?” Setting out without full knowledge, it suggests, may be the only honest way to travel — or to paint.

Sabrina Amrani and Carabanchel

Sabrina Amrani runs three adjoining spaces on Calle Sallaberry in Carabanchel — the main gallery at No. 50, Projects at No. 52 and Editions at No. 54 — part of a southward drift of Madrid’s contemporary scene away from the traditional gallery streets of Salamanca and Chueca. A third solo show in the same space signals a sustained gallery commitment, letting regular visitors follow how Bettini’s Argentine-Spanish perspective has developed since 2020.

Why it matters for collectors and painters

For collectors, Bettini combines institutional validation — Reina Sofía, Jumex, Sandretto — with a body of work that still includes intimate, small-format pieces, a rare entry point. For painters, the lesson is how a genre considered exhausted can be recharged: by questioning the source image, by painting the tape as well as the map, and by letting scientific imagery and historical cartography share a wall.

Visiting information

Sabrina Amrani, Calle Sallaberry 50, 28019 Madrid. 14 November 2026 – 13 February 2027. Open Tuesday–Friday 11:00–19:00, Saturday 11:00–17:00. Tel. +34 916 217 859. Opening reception: check with the gallery. See the gallery’s exhibition page, our Gabriela Bettini Madrid listing, and more openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.