Albert Serra

The Museo Reina Sofía presents an exhibition by film-maker Albert Serra (Banyoles, Gerona, 1975), featuring his latest audiovisual work and framed inside the Fissures programme, set up to support contemporary artistic production.

Defined by critics as an unflinching artist who remains at a distance from the conventional circles of the genre, Serra has shown his work at major international festivals such as Cannes (2006 and 2008), Toronto (2016) and Locarno (2013), where his film Historia de la meva mort (The Story of My Death, 2013), set in the transition between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the literary figures of Casanova and Dracula, was voted Best Film. Serra also frequently works with museums, both in Spain and internationally; in 2010, in conjunction with the exhibition ¿Estáis listos para la televisión? (Are You Ready for TV?) held in MACBA, he presented a 14-episode series entitled Els noms de Crist (The Names of Christ, 2010), filmed in the museum’s galleries and based on the work The Names of Christ by Fray Luis de León (1586). A year later he made El Senyor ha fet en mi meravelles (The Lord Worked Wonders in Me) for the show The Complete Letters. Filmed Correspondence, in Barcelona’s CCCB, whereby Serra and his crew travelled to La Mancha in search of the landscapes in Quixote’s life that could be used for a film.

Moreover, Serra’s work has been the subject of retrospectives in institutions such as Centre Pompidou in Paris and Cinematek in Brussels, as well as Tate Modern in London, where his work was displayed in 2015. He has also participated in prestigious international art events, including documenta 13 in Kassel with Els tres porquets (The Three Little Pigs, 2012), in which he transferred texts by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Adolf Hitler and Rainer Werner Fassbinder on to screen, and the 56^th Venice Biennale, where he participated with La singularitat (Singularity, 2015) in his exploration of the relationship between man and machine. In 2017 he won a Special Feroz Award for his film La muerte de Luis XIV (The Death of Louis XIV, 2016), which recounts the final days of the French monarch, also the subject of his recent work Roi Soleil (The Sun King, 2018), the winner, together with Dora García’s Second Time Around (2018), of the Best Film Award at the 2018 Marseille International Film Festival.