Encuentros

Description (January 12 - March 25 2011), an exhibition of the work of the Austrian artist Dorit Margreiter (Vienna, 1967), is comprised of four film installations in which she expresses her reflections on the limits and the relationship between architecture and its representation in the collective cultural imaginary.
On the occasion of this exhibition, a conversation will take place between the artist, Sabeth Buchmann, art historian and professor at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and Lynne Cooke, the curator of the exhibition and deputy director of Museo Reina Sofía.

Not only is the Argentine artist Roberto Jacoby (Buenos Aires, 1944) one of the most important figures in conceptual art in Latin American, his work shows an exceptional versatility, symptom of an ever-changing career. Through his work he promotes collaboration in transversal networks and attempts to bring about the formation of experimental communities that are motivated by desire. Ana Longoni, art historian and curator of the exhibition El deseo nace del derrumbe (February 25 – May 30, 2011) converse with the artist.

The worker-photography movement is often marginalized in discussions of how photographic modernism evolved over the course of the 20th century. This visit to the exhibition is intended to help rectify this shortcoming and provide the elements necessary to convey a history of the movement, for the first time, in a museum of modern art. Jorge Ribalta, photography historian and curator of the exhibition, makes, in this presentation, an initial attempt at historization, in which the idea is not to look at particular artists and photographs, but rather to narrate the creation of public spaces through the medium of photography.

Leon Golub (Chicago, 1922 – 2004) is considered a central figure in North American art from the 1940s on, although his work often ran counter to official currents. His rejection of the autonomy and isolation of the artist, as espoused by abstract expressionism, led him to develop a new approach to the painting of contemporary history. Leon Golub does not just portray the world; he comments on it, he embodies it and he attacks it from the outside, using the body as a territory of conflict and political violence.

Participants:

Jon Bird, professor at Middlesex University in London, author of Leon Golub: Echoes of the Real (2000) and curator of the exhibition Leon Golub (Museo Reina Sofía, May 5th – September 12th, 2011).
Samm Kunce, community artist who deals with the inheritance of Leon Golub’s work in Chicago.
Satish Padiyar, professor at London's Courtauld Institute of Art and author of Chains, David, Canova and the Fall of the Public Hero in Postrevolutionary France (2007).

There is no possible separation between art and life with Yayoi Kusama (Matsumoto, 1928). She was an active member in the critical art scene during the Vietnam War in the 1960s in New York, where she was also connected to minimalism, happenings and pop art. In 1973, she returned to Japan, extending the boundaries of her work. Her heterogeneous production ranges from collage to musical compositions, design, novels and installation art. Kusama obsessively develops the idea of repetition and screentone, covering surfaces with polka dots, creating what she calls ‘infinity nets’, one of her trademarks.

The exhibition Yayoi Kusama (Museo Reina Sofía, 11 May – 18 September 2011), organised in collaboration with the Tate Modern, London, is the first large retrospective dedicated to the artist to date.

Curator Frances Morris, Head of Collections (International Art) at the Tate Modern, is participating in the public presentation of the exhibition.