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June 9, 2015 Nouvel Building, Study Center
Marcel Broodthaers. Research Seminar
Attendance: free admission by writing to centrodeestudios@museoreinasofia.es indicating your interest and training. The seminar will be held in English without simultaneous interpretation. Limited places.
In 1968 Marcel Broodthaers founded the Museum of Modern Art. Department of Eagles, a museum with no collection and no definitive location, divided into different sections reflecting, through art reproductions, daily objects and images, the iconography of power in its clearest manifestation. In 1970, he added the “Financial Section”, the function of which was to sell the museum by destabilising market prices. Broodthaers appeared to envisage the catastrophic reverse of the current modern art museum: an institution devoted to exhibiting and certifying the miracle of the transformation of nothing into the unimaginable accumulation of value. Is it possible, in light of the Belgian’s work, to counter this model with the one in which the museum is an institution that inherits the illustrated public sphere? Is it possible to imagine another affirmative and critical museum that structures and deconstructs its public and counteracts the logic of the fully integrated museum?
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June 10, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
From Birkenau to Dresden: Memory in the Abstract Works of Gerhard Richter
Attendance: free, until full capacity is reached
Gerhard Richter’s most recent work, entitled Birkenau, is inspired by the publication of four photographs secretly taken by prisoners at Auschwitz and subsequently published by the French art historian Georges Didi- Hubermann in his book Images in Spite of All (2004). Richter’s group of abstract works, after being reformulated in the space of a year, were duplicated and digitised and installed this year in Dresden, the artist’s hometown, for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Connecting his city with the history of German Nazism, precisely in the most notorious location of destruction caused by Allied bombing, once again Richter places his spectators before the height of mnemonic challenges, with an unmanageable past and a continued reflection on human brutality in the 20th century and in the present.
Benjamin Buchloh
From Birkenau to Dresden: Memory in the Abstract Works of Gerhard Richter
Held on 09, 10 Jun 2015
Started in 2010, the Museo Reina Sofía’s programme of master lectures marks the beginning, or end, of the annual academic activity conducted in the Museo, comprising a series of MAs, study programmes, debate groups and research residencies, run in collaboration with different universities.
Following the previous master lectures, which looked to recognise the methodological tensions that have transformed art history in recent years, by Linda Nochlin (2010), T.J Clark (2011), Simón Marchán Fiz (2012) and Hans Belting (2013), this year’s edition is centred upon Benjamin Buchloh.
On this occasion, it will be split into two sessions to focus on two artists and two modes of production that have characterised the work of the German historian, found between critique and the university. One is a research seminar on Marcel Broodthaers and the other a public lecture focused on Gerard Richter.
Education programme developed under the patronage of
Participants
Benjamin Buchloh is editor of the journals Interfunktionen (1969–1975) and October (since 1990) and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art from the Department of Art History and Architecture at Harvard University. His work has keenly recovered the critical legacy and structural challenge of artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Asher, Dan Graham and James Coleman. The essays compiled in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (The MIT Press, 2000) are characterised by their analysis of the return to the idea of the Avant-garde in changing post-war capitalism and their pivotal definition of the so-called institutional critique as a driving force behind conceptual practice in contrast to the culture managed by cultural institutions in the same epoch. By the same token, the tension between opposing historiographical categories dominates both Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art (2004), (Akal, 2004) and Art Since 1900: Modernity, Antimodernity, Postmodernity (Akal, 2006, co-edited with Rosalind Krauss, Yve Alain Bois and Hal Foster). The deeply held conviction in the critical and resistant role of the museum and contemporary art in the trivialisation of entertainment is one of the defining traits of Benjamin Buchloh’s writing and thinking.
Más actividades
International Museum Day 2026 with Radio 3
22 MAY 2026
On Friday, 22 May 2026 the Museo Reina Sofía celebrates International Museum Day by way of a vibrant music programme conducted by Radio 3.
From 9am to 11pm, the Museo’s Nouvel Courtyard will host the live broadcast of Radio 3’s day-long programme —also available on a video streaming on the Radio3 website and app, on RTVEPlay and on the Museo’s social media accounts. The programme comprises more than twenty live acts, including artists such as Carlangas, Shego, Soleá Morente, Kokoshca, La Tania, La Pegatina, Pipiolas, Ángel Stanich, Triángulo de Amor Bizarro and Zahara, and many others.
With this programme the Museo Reina Sofía concludes its celebration of International Museum Day, which takes place on Monday, 18 May. Both on 18 May, from 10am to 9pm, and 22 May admission to the Museo will be free of charge.
Institutional Decentralisation
Thursday, 21 May 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Gerardo Mosquera: Island Thinker, Global Curator
19 MAY 2026
This encounter pays homage to Gerardo Mosquera (Havana, 1945), a pre-eminent curator, an essayist who has been part of key debates on decolonisation and the drifts of globalisation, a communicator and, primarily, an art critic who has managed to radically situate discourses and practices, while still taking on risks and perpetually upholding committed ethical positions.
Mosquera is one of the foremost curators internationally and was involved with the Havana Biennial from its foundation in 1984 to 1989, as well as curating pivotal shows in museums and art centres around the globe. Notable among his curatorial work is as adjunct curator at the New Museum in New York (1995–2009), the Liverpool Biennial (2006) and the exhibition It’s Not Just What You See. Perverting Minimalism (Museo Reina Sofía, 2000).
This round-table discussion, which features the participation of Gerardo Mosquerahimself and an ensemble of art critics, thinkers and artists, for instance Fernando Castro Flórez, Diana Cuéllar, Lillebit Fadraga and René Francisco Rodríguez, will approach the multifaceted and extremely fertile work of Mosquera as a renowned master curator.
Miguel Falomir, Director of the Museo Nacional del Prado, in Conversation with Museo Reina Sofía Director Manuel Segade
18 MAY 2026
Museo del Prado and Museo Reina Sofía directors, Miguel Falomir and Manuel Segade, respectively,engage in conversation on Monday, 18 May in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Auditorium 400, in conjunction with International Museum Day 2026, the theme of which is “Museums Uniting a Dividing World”. The discussion, moderated by journalist and poet Antonio Lucas, will see the two heads of these major cultural institutions share their reflections on the role they play in today’s society.
In addition to addressing the management of art, the conversation seeks to explore in greater depth museums’ potential as meeting points to face today’s social tensions, thereby fulfilling the international mandate of this year’s edition.
The activity will be live-streamed and is available at this link.
Collection. Contemporary Art: 1975–Present
Miércoles 13 de mayo, 2026 - 19:00 h
In this lecture, Museo Reina Sofía director Manuel Segade outlines the key readings of the new presentation of the Collection on Floor 4 of the Sabatini Building. This new arrangement is framed inside an ambitious rehang that harnesses the uses of the Museo’s architecture, in a plan that will continue in 2027 with the opening of Floor 3 in the same building, culminating with Floor 2 in 2028.
The new rehang of the Collections, unveiled on 16 February 2026, sets forth a journey through contemporary art history over the past fifty years in Spain. Rather than an unambiguous narrative, the floor recounts the same period — from the Transition to democracy in Spain to the present — in three different ways, starting back at the 1970s time and again.
The exhibition route gets under way with a prologue that travels through the affections, material culture and institutionalism of the Spanish Transition, serving as a starting point for the three routes that follow. The first, A History of Affect in Contemporary Art, advances from affective systems in artmaking linked to the second wave of feminism, arriving at grief as a tool to interpret new realities. The second route, The Powers of Fiction: Sculpture, New Materialisms, and Relational Aesthetics, is conceived as a sculpture gallery in which the artworks engage with the public, focusing on the performance side of the discipline. This route shows, among other aspects, how Spanish sculpture has gained significant international visibility since the 1980s, with women artists playing a key role in this display. The third route, A New Framework. The Institution, the Market, and the Art that Transcends Both, zooms in on the origins of the Museo and its role in the process of art’s institutionalisation in Spain. In May 1986 the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía opened, occupying the first and second floors of the former hospital: the forty years that have elapsed since then enable a re-evaluation of the effects of the Museo on Spanish art and art on the institution.
This talk strengthens the goal of socially integrating the narratives produced by the Museo at a time when the Collections are under permanent review.