MADRID—Cecilia de Val’s photographs certainly take a page from the Cindy Sherman playbook — the young Spanish artist and singer stars in each carefully staged and art-directed image — but where Sherman often mines the media of the past for her images, de Val’s work has a decidedly futuristic tone, even when the characters are plucked directly from fairy-tale lore.

While Sherman’s work has a certain humor, warmth, and richness to it, the images in de Val’s current exhibition, “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” on view at Madrid’s Camara Oscura Galeria de Arte through February 28, are chillingly austere. Her characters, all female, look as airbrushed and stylized as the spindly models on the pages of Vogue, and her sets and settings favor clean geometry and manipulated flatness. Even when her characters (often multiple embodiments of de Val herself) find themselves in what should be emotionally charged situations — they’re seen bound, bleeding, lost in the woods, or just lost in general — they seem remote and detached, never engaging with the camera directly, and do not elicit an emotional response.

It is unclear whether de Val’s disconnected scenes are meant to evoke dreams, dramas, fashion shoots, or Jungian archetypes — or perhaps all of the above. Whatever her intent, the affected, anonymous air of her photographs makes the viewer question traditional representations of women and girls as much as Sherman’s moving, costumed embodiments do.

Here, De Val suggests some art to see this weekend if you’re in Madrid for ARCO, both inside and outside of the fair.

“ARCO, the international art fair of Madrid, will be held February 11 to 16. This year the guest country is India, so it’s a great opportunity to see the newest and most groundbreaking Indian art. Inside ARCO I recommend:

“The booth of the gallery Haunch of Venison to see the sculptures of the Indian artist Jitish Kallat. I find his skeleton-truck sculptures so brilliant. They consist of trucks that mutate into fossils of prehistoric animals, in a metaphor of the fast transformation of Indian cities.

“Also the sound installation of the German artist Candie Hank (Patric Catani), who is a founder of the bands Puppetmastaz, A*Class, and others and a very interesting and unclassifiable celebrity in Berlin’s panoramic music scene.”

Outside ARCO you should see:

“The Crystal Palace, which was created for a 19th-century exhibition, is one of my favorite places in Madrid. Located at the heart of the Retiro park, it sits beside a small lake inhabited by ducks, gray geese, and black swans for one of Madrid’s most bucolic images. On view through March 30 is an exhibition of U.S. artist Josiah McElheny’s crystal sculpture Island Universe. The show, organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, which is also showing a film by the artist shot at the New York Metropolitan Opera, is based on new theories about the origin of the universe. Don’t miss it!

“Another of my favorite places in Madrid is the Museo Nacional del Prado. Right now they are having a Francis Bacon retrospective (the museum’s first). Once a regular visitor of the museum, Bacon used to seek inspiration from artists like Velázquez and Goya. Now it is possible to experience the meeting of this great contemporary master with the classic artists he admired. Through April 19.

“Finally, I recommend the multidisciplinary arts center La Casa Encendida. There is always something interesting to see there, whether art, independent cinema, theater, dance, or something else entirely. At the moment, they have an exhibition of the French artist Pierre Coulibeuf that includes his video-installation Somewhere in Between as well as three of his films. Through a mixture of fiction and experimentation, he always creates a very personal language and calls into question canonical forms and media. I really enjoy his work: It always revolves around his own planteamientos, or worldviews, and overtly questions how to represent reality.”