Past 2010

Francis Alÿs: Fabiola

Date: October 28, 2009 - March 7, 2010
Place: Santo Domingo de Silos Monastery (Burgos)

Fabiola is an exhibition dedicated to Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (Antwerp, 1959) comprised of some three hundred works belonging to the artist’s collection. This exhibition could be seen last year at the Dia Art Foundation of New York and has been shown recently at the National Portrait Gallery in London, making its next stop at Silos. The exhibition’s point of departure is found in a work whose whereabouts are currently unknown: comprised of some three hundred works belonging to the artist’s collection. This exhibition could be seen last year at the Dia Art Foundation of New York and has been shown recently at the National Portrait Gallery in London, making its next stop at Silos. The exhibition’s point of departure is found in a work whose whereabouts are currently unknown: Fabiola in a Red Veil by French painter Jean–Jacques Henner (1829-1905), which represents the figure of St. Fabiola who lived in Rome around the fourth century. Over the years, Francis Alÿs has amassed numerous works by different artists who have depicted the Christian saint using highly diverse materials. With his collection, Alÿs aims at lending creative legitimacy to anonymous objects, an inherent characteristic in the artist’s own production and research on collecting. + info

León Ferrari and Mira Schendel: The Frenzied Alphabet

Date: November 25, 2009 - March 1, 2010
Place: Sabatini Building, Floor 3

Schendel and Ferrari emerged during a time marked by the use of linguistic models—semiotics, post-structuralism, philosophies of language—to understand the world, a period when many intellectuals made language a paradigm for thought and for the world itself. Unlike Conceptual artists, their contemporaries in North America and Europe, Ferrari and Schendel use language not merely as a vehicle for expressing concepts or ideas but as an almost physical medium to shape and mold. Addressing language and art in their most concrete forms, they introduced the challenges of life into art as its content. The Frenzied Alphabet: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel is the first major exhibition of their work in the United States. + info

Georges Vantongerloo. Aspiring to Infinity

Date: November 4, 2009 - February 22, 2010
Place: Sabatini Building, Floor 3, Rooms 306 y 308

Despite Vantongerloo’s regard as one of the most important artists and thinkers in the twentieth century, few exhibitions to date have been dedicated to him. Curated by Guy Brett, the Museum’s exhibition on this artist aims at exploring the fundamentals of his oeuvre, in which his re-conceptualization of space in painting and sculpture influenced artistic tendencies in early twentieth-century abstract art. The exhibition also focuses on the final period of his work after World War II, in which the artist, through a succession of radical leaps, arrived at an original and intuitive visual encapsulation of the Universe’s energy. + info

The Pamplona Encounters 1972: The End of the Party for Experimental Art

Date: October 28, 2009 - February 22, 2010
Place: Sabatini Building, Floor 3, Rooms 301, 302, 303, 304 y 308

This exhibition draws from the Pamplona Encounters in 1972, Spain’s most internationally renowned avant-garde festival, as a point of departure for revisiting experimental art from the period. The event represented the culmination of experimental artistic practices from the 1960s, at once their height and a turning point that flagged the decline of these tendencies. At the time, the term “experimental” alluded to works that called into question the material limits of their chosen media, whether poetry, cinema, music, painting or sculpture. But above all, the event constituted an unprecedented staging of contradictions in avant-garde movements, particularly among the official avant-garde (Abstract and Concrete Expressionism, Social Realism, Pop art, etc.) and those we could designate “iteralists”, or—in a less precise, broader term—Conceptual movements. + info

Francesco Lo Savio

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents the work of Francesco Lo Savio (Rome, 1935 – Marseilles, 1963), an artist whose short life and career were nevertheless highly prolific and influential. In merely five years, Lo Savio had the opportunity to traverse different artistic tendencies and even create a new language that, without realizing it at the time, would become a premonition for movements only fully developed at the end of the 1960s. + info

Joëlle Tuerlinckx. Crystal Times. Reflexions without Sun / Projections without Object

Date: October 9, 2009 - February 22, 2010
Place: Palacio de Cristal and Sabatini Building, Floor 3, Room 305

Artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx (Brussels, 1958) presents her first individual exhibition in Spain. Conceived specifically for the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid’s Parque del Retiro, the installation recreates and subtly maximizes the exceptional lighting conditions of this nineteenth-century pavilion. A trio of “light beams” literally and metaphorically creates a luminous module that gives life to this space. Tuerlinckx will complement this work, created especially for the occasion, with archive materials and a grouping of sculptures to be exhibited in the Sabatini Building—a space that also reacts to changes in light, but with very different symbolic and physical circumstances from those at the Palacio de Cristal. + info

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