Exhibitions

This exhibition explores Russian avant-garde art through the perspective of the Anti-art canons associated with the international Dada movement. The anti-academic work of Kazimir Malevich to eclipse classical art and the transrational language experiments (zaum) of Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh are just some of the early contributions which substantiate the reasoning behind this show.

The Portuguese-born Brazilian artist Artur Barrio (Porto, 1945), winner of the Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts in 2011, has been one the foremost figures of Action Art and conceptualisms in Latin America since he burst on to the Brazilian art scene in the late 1960s, at a time fraught with political tension and mounting repression under the military dictatorship. Interventions in public spaces and the search for a place of expression outside art institutions converge in this artist as a symbol of resistance to poeticise daily life, with the body of the artist the focal point of these actions in a critique of social coercion.

The photography of Marc Pataut (Paris, 1952) is structured around the formulation of research projects which address those political and human issues which often stand outside art institutions’ parameters.

The exhibition Pessoa. All Art Is a Form of Literature takes its title from a quote by Álvaro de Campos, one of the most avant-garde heteronyms created by Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon, 1888–1935), and published in the influential Portuguese magazine presença.

Upon finishing his degree in Politics and African Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, William Kentridge (Johannesburg, 1955) moved to Paris for a year to study theatre and mime.

George Herriman (New Orleans, 1880 – Los Angeles, 1944), regarded as one of the foremost American cartoonists, was part of a generation of pioneering artists who developed their work in the newspapers that started to feature comic strips at the turn of the twentieth century. Herriman’s work was hugely influential among a broad array of artists, including Willem de Kooning and Öyvind Fahlström, as well as intellectuals and writers such as E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot and Jack Kerouac

This exhibition offering, folding out across two shows, sets forth a broad selection of works comprising the temporary loan made by the gallerist Soledad Lorenzo to the Museo Reina Sofía in 2014.