Richard Hamilton The Museo Reina Sofía pays homage to the figure of Richard Hamilton by means of an eponymous exhibition, held between 27 June and 13 October 2014. The piece, produced by Javi Álvarez, explores the most unique aspects of Hamilton’s work, reinterpreting many of the artist’s techniques, such as appropriation and collage, to convey them in the sphere of contemporary video. Exhibitions
Interview with Kerry James Marshall June 2014 In this interview, artist Kerry James Marshall (Birmingham, Alabama, 1955; currently resident of Chicago), talks about the reasons why he chose to address themes related to life, culture and Afro-American history, until that moment barely represented, approached through multiple lenses to provide new visions of issues connected to racial politics, cultural representation and social emancipation. Exhibitions
photobooks. Spain 1905-1977 Interview with Horacio Fernández May 2014 The Exhibition photobooks. Spain 1905-1977 presents a journey through the history of the photobook in Spain, setting off at the beginning of the 20th century and ending in the mid seventies, via a selection from the Museo Reina Sofía Collection, contextualised and accompanied by an assortment of complementary material. Curated by Horacio Fernández, the exhibition photobooks. Spain 1905-1977 is in collaboration with Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) to present part of the line of investigation and acquisition carried out by the Museo Reina Sofía concerning photobooks. Exhibitions
Playgrounds Reinventing the Square May 2014 With some 300 works, the exhibition recounts a different history of art, from the end of the 19th century to the present day, in which artists and activists play a part in redefining public space by exploring the city as a game board, questioning modern-day carnival and holidays, vindicating the right to laziness, reinventing the square as a place of revolt and discovering the possibilities of a new world through its waste. The exhibit takes the playground model as an ideological interrogation of an alienated and consumerist present. Exhibitions
João Fernandes about the Exhibition Time and Things. The Home Studio of Hanne Darboven March, 2014 Hanne Darboven is an artist that has delved into the languages of conceptual art and minimal art, which have opened new formal possibilities for expression in the second half of the century. Her numerical series and series of drawings have filled the rooms of many exhibitions and many museums, but her serialism is very different from the one found in the work of other minimalist artists who have also used numerical progressions, such as Sol LeWitt. In this exhibition we are going to find a set of series related to Darboven's everyday life, at home and at work. Exhibitions
Poetry Lecture by Ben Okri January, 2014 Poetry lecture by Ben Okri on the opening of Elly Strik. Ghosts, Brides and other Companions, on January 22, 2014. Exhibitions Live Arts
Splendide Hotel, conversation with Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster March, 2014 The year of construction of the Palacio de Cristal, 1887, is also the year of many events such as the construction of the Eiffel Tower, the birth of Le Corbusier, the invention of the gramophone ... a century in which the production conditions change, industrial production starts, and objects, that start losing their specificity because of the mass production, led to the emerge of some ideas like inner monologue, free verse or more open forms of theater. Exhibitions
Wols: Cosmos and Street, interview with Guy Brett February, 2014 Guy Brett, the curator of the show Wols: Cosmos and Street, talks about this new approach to the work of the German artist, not only about his drawings and paintings, but also about his lesser known photographs. Exhibitions Centro de estudios
play pause stop 00:00 00:00 Download Amos Gitai and Jean-François Chevrier Amos Gitai, in conversation with Jean-François Chevrier 5 february, 2014 Exhibitions Seminars and conferences Centro de estudios
The Biographies of Amos Gitai: an Interview February, 2014 For Amos Gitai, the documentary is human archaeology, whereas fiction is architecture. In this exhibition, the Middle East, his parents, and his family memories intermingle with his oeuvre, transcending into physical, audiovisual space, as well as dealing with the multilayered reality which conforms the current sociopolitical landscape. Exhibitions
Elly Strik about her exhibition Ghosts, Brides and other Companions January, 2014 Artist Elly Strik talks in this video about the influence of Goya and Freud in her work, as well as the personal connection between her artistic production, her memories and her body. The exhibition Elly Strik. Ghosts, Brides and other Companions, conceived specifically for the galleries of Museo Reina Sofía explores, through drawings on paper with graphite and oil, the potential of physical metamorphosis processes in parallel with the artistic creation process. Exhibitions
Biographical forms Construction and individual mythology December, 2013 In the following video the curator of the exhibition, Jean-François Chevrier, and the Director of the Museum, Manuel J. Borja-Villel, explain the ways in which artists endeavoured to transform the idea of the biographical account and broke with the conventions of biographism to elaborate freely on the basis of certain elements taken from their own life history. The exhibition Biographical forms. Construction and individual mythology reviews the narrative dimension of art in its relationship with literary manifestations. The selection of works analyses the binomial “life and work” as well as the identity and biography construction mechanisms that operate throughout 20th century artistic activity. Exhibitions
Idea: Painting-Force. The Hinge Between the 1970s and 1980s Interview with Armando Montesinos November, 2013 Armando Montesinos, curator of the exhibition, explains in this interview the keys of Idea: Painting-Force. The works of Alfonso Albacete, Miguel Ángel Campano, Ferran Garcia Sevilla, Juan Navarro Baldeweg and Manolo Quejido, dating from 1978 to 1984, comprise the proposal put forward in the exhibition in Palacio de Velázquez, Parque del Retiro. They carried out this activity at the height of the crisis affecting the modern movement and the idea of the avant-garde. Plus, they were working in Spain, in a setting that, on the hinge between the 70s and the 80s, was experiencing some newly-arrived democratic liberties and whose artistic scene had derived from the dominant acritical formalism to the emergence of the market and the aesthetics of success. Exhibitions Centro de estudios
Minimal Resistance Between late modernism and globalisation: artistic practices during the 80s and 90s October, 2013 In this video, Manuel Borja-Villel, the director of the Museum, explains how this exhibition takes a close look at art produced in Spain and abroad during the 1980s and 1990s. Minimal Resistance centres on the search by artists of new spaces for resistance in a globalised world and it examines a series of dualities that polarized the period covered: from the global economic crisis to financial capitalism, from the potential of the collective to the recovery of the myth of the artist, from actions claiming public space to discourses around memory and the body, from a kind of theatricality emphasising scenography and architecture to performative languages and relational models and from the restoration of traditional genres to the appropriation of images from mass media and mass culture. Exhibitions
Interview with Chris Killip about trabajo / work October, 2013 In this video the artist Chris Killip explains his work in the field of photography and talks about his artistic influences. An essential figure in documentary photography, Killip’s work reflects the fascination and respect he feels for ordinary life and people, finding a form of expression that underscores the social and cultural peculiarities that characterised the period.The exhibition contains a selection of over a hundred images taken between 1968 and 2004. Exhibitions
Fisuras Program September, 2013 In this video Manuel Borja-Villel, the director of the Museum, explains the works created by Gabriel Acevedo Velarde, Maria Loboda, Alejandra Riera and Manuel Saiz specifically for the Fisuras program.The project Paranormal Citizen, by Gabriel Acevedo Velarde, makes use of televised stories about paranormal experiences to analyse and create narratives about the intermediate space between institutions and individual subjectivity. Maria Loboda, in The Beasts, engages in a kind of contemporary archaeology that starts with the recontextualization of objects containing various strata of meaning, in such a way that what is shown - even though it is inscribed in a place of safety such as a museum - has a potentially threatening dimension. Poétique(s) de l’inachèvement [Poetics of incompleteness] initiated by Alejandra Riera is the title chosen by the artist for a project that lingers in certain experiences so dense that film cannot take them in, although it does accompany them. Finally, One True Art - 16 Responses to the Question What Art is, by Manuel Saiz, is a performative artistic experiment the aim of which is to formulate a definition of art or to reflect on the reasons that such a definition is impossible. Exhibitions
Interview with the artist Roman Ondák and the curator João Fernandes about the exhibition Scene September, 2013 In this video, the curator of the exhibition João Fernandes and the artist Roman Ondák explain this work generated specifically for the Palacio de Cristal (Parque del Retiro), characterized by its questioning of the work of art in relation to the conventions generated by the place and space in which it appearsThe artist here adds a new architectural element to the existing building that takes material form in an elevated walkway running all around it. This walkway, accessed from inside the building, offers all its visitors the opportunity of a new perception of the space, for the Palacio de Cristal can now be looked into from the outside in a way not previously permitted by its architecture. Exhibitions
Dalí All of the poetic suggestions and all of the plastic possibilities August, 2013 All of the poetic suggestions and all of the plastic possibilities presents Dalí as an omnivorous and visionary artist who used himself as an object of study, and whose actions in the public sphere, whether they were calculated or improvised, made him an essential figure in the sphere of contemporary representation. The exhibition focuses primarily on his surrealist period. Special attention is devoted to his paranoid-critical method, which he developed as a mechanism for the transformation and subversion of reality, allowing the final interpretation of a work to depend totally on the viewer. Exhibitions
Interview with Julia Robinson and Christian Xatrec about ± I96I. Founding the Expanded Arts July, 2013 The curators of this exhibition, Julia Robinson and Christian Xatrec, explain in this video some of the keys to understand why 1961 was a decisive year that led to the invention of the “expansion of the arts”. The exhibition looks at the origins of the change, the experimental activity and the earliest collective actions that pointed to the beginning of an unprecedented expansion of the notion of “composition” and soon generated a multidisciplinary project that took place in real time/simultaneously over the course of that year. Exhibitions Centro de estudios
Conversation with the curator João Fernandes and the artist Cildo Meireles about his exhibition June, 2013 The curator of the Cildo Meireles exhibition, João Fernandes, along with the artist himself, discuss the relationship between this artist's work and the spectator's sensorial experience, the critical use of ideological and economic circulation systems, and the ethical connection with the world. The exhibition comprises works and installations being presented for the first time and also others that are among the artist's lesser known creations. Exhibitions
Montse Aguer about Dalí exhibition. Todas las sugestiones poéticas y todas las posibilidades plásticas April, 2013 Montse Aguer, one of the exhibition's curators, takes viewers on a tour of the Salvador Dalí show, putting forward a new vision of the artist as a thinker, writer and creator of a very particular vision of the world. The exhibition comprises approximately two hundred works and is organised into eleven sections that follow something of a chronological order. The works on display date from the early years of his career up through his religious and mystical phases, his period of experimentation with scenography and also the end of his career, which was closely linked to science and technology. Exhibitions