In 2014, returning from Brazil, I curated a retrospective exhibition of my uncle Marcel Giró in Badalona, his hometown. Then I looked for a place with enough entity to do another one in Barcelona and I only received excuses, evasions or silences from the main galleries and museums of the city. Only Rocío was immediately interested, demonstrating that she knew how to value a work as forceful as Giró's, overcoming the prejudices and cronyism so common in the art world and institutions. Since then, Rocío has shown Giró's and Palmira Puig's work all over the world, and has organized remarkable exhibitions at her gallery on Gran Vía.
Rocío Santa Cruz moves with a lot of experience and astuteness in the art world. She knows everyone and knows how and when to play each piece to win the game. That is why she has collected so many successes and has turned her gallery into an essential reference of contemporary art and photography worldwide.
We spend many hours together in my studio reviewing the Giró y Puig archive, and there I realize that, beyond organizing exhibitions and traveling to fairs around the world, Rocío's true passion is research: immersing herself in hundreds of contact sheets, negatives and documents of all kinds to reconstruct stories.
Not forgetting her other great passion, books, which has led her to create ArtsLibris, currently one of the most important fairs in the sector.
In 2014, returning from Brazil, I curated a retrospective exhibition of my uncle Marcel Giró in Badalona, his hometown. Then I looked for a place with enough entity to do another one in Barcelona and I only received excuses, evasions or silences from the main galleries and museums of the city. Only Rocío was immediately interested, evidencing that she knew how to value a work as powerful as Giró's, overcoming the prejudices and cronyism so common in the world of art and institutions. Since then, Rocío has shown Giró's and Palmira Puig's work all over the world, and has organized remarkable exhibitions at her gallery on Gran Vía Avenue in Barcelona.
Rocío Santa Cruz moves with a lot of expertise and astuteness in the art world. She knows everyone and knows how and when to play each piece to win the game. That is why she has collected so many successes and has turned her gallery into an essential reference of contemporary art and photography worldwide.
We spend many hours together in my studio reviewing the Giró and Puig archive, and there I realize that, beyond organizing exhibitions and traveling to fairs around the world, Rocío's true passion is research: diving into the hundreds of contact sheets, negatives and documents of all kinds to reconstruct stories.
Not forgetting her other great passion, books, which has led her to create ArtsLibris, currently one of the most important fairs in the sector.
Rocío Santa Cruz, founder and CEO of ArtsLibris, studied at the École Estienne in Paris and is also the initiator of the publishing label Raíña Lupa, created in the French capital in 1994 and moved to Barcelona in 2002. Involved in the world of gallerism for years, since 2015 she has been running the gallery that bears her same name in Barcelona.
The interconnection between art and literature, through various projects such as the edition of illustrated books, and the curatorship of exhibitions -such as Leer imágenes: el archivo fotográfico de Julio Cortázar and La palabra y su sombra, José Ángel Valente- constitute her main interests. In her activity as a gallery owner, her focuses of interest are photography, experimental cinema and the edition of artist's books, and she conceives the gallery as a container of ideas, a space for discussion and dissemination of contemporary artistic practices.