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February 11, 2016
Luc Tuymans, in conversation with Ulrich Loock
Andrzej Wróblewski’s search to find his own place, questioning both socialist government authorities and post-war experimentalism, meant that the artist would not find solace in his own times, but instead, paradoxically, his explorations have been cast into our present. At the beginning of the 1990s, the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans discovered a dual meaning in the Polish artist’s work as it revealed drama and spectre with which to reinvent history painting. The trauma of memory, the constant repetition in series and spatial meaning in Wróblewski’s narrative would be decisive in approaching the modern-day painting that lies between realism and abstraction.
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February 12, 2016
Andrzej Wajda. Wróblewski According to Wajda
Presentation by Marta Dziewańska
International premiere. Film, 2016. Digital archive, colour, original version with Spanish subtitles, 40’. Courtesy of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute
Andrzej Wajdá is the most pre-eminent member of the Polish Film School movement, which also included film-makers such as Andrzej Munk, Wojciech Has, Feliks Falk and Jerzy Kawalerowicz. His work binds modernity from new European cinema and a reflection on national and identity issues in Poland, and this film, his most recent, sees the director of Kanal (1957) narrate an account of his own relationship with Wróblewski during the montage of an historic retrospective exhibition in the Manggha Museum in Kraków, the fourth show focused on the painter’s work. The film-maker, a contemporary of the painter’s generation, decided to relinquish painting after discovering his friend’s unique oeuvre, and would later take charge of organising the first solo exhibition devoted to Wróblewski, held in 1956, and the first collective exhibition centred on his work and held after his death in 1958. Furthermore, both projects were linked via a series of reciprocations and coincidences the film-maker and painter kept up at the time by way of an intense epistolary exchange.
Held on 11, 12 feb 2016
The contradictions and enigmas of Andrej Wróblewski (1927–1957) are tackled by a painter and a film-maker as they run through lateral and unknown interpretations of an intense and complex body of work. The painter Luc Tuymans, who engages in conversation with Ulrich Loock, and the film-maker Andrzej Wajda, via the premiere of his latest film Wróblewski According to Wajda, contemplate paintings that still challenge interpretive frameworks of 20th-century art history today. A realist and at the same time abstract, an individualist whilst also an advocate of collective artistic practice, experimental yet socially committed, Wróblewski considers a series of ambivalences through his work that call into question key aspects from both his own epoch and the present: the relationship between art and political ideology during totalitarianism, the possibilities for painting after the historical avant-garde movements, and the dilemmas between communication and experimentation in a world that was devastated after the war, among numerous other aspects.
Andrzej Wróblewski’s work barely spanned a decade, from the time of his participation at the First Exhibition of Modern Art (Kraków 1948), alongside Tadeusz Kantor and other artists, until his death in an accident in 1957. Between these two points in time a space opened in which a series of styles and opposing approaches would converge, for instance Geometric Abstraction, Socialist Realism, caricature and satire and Existentialist Surrealism. As a whole, this contradictory amassing uncovers painting’s place in the aftermath of The Second World War as it was caught between scepticism and historical avant-garde movements, the ethical obligation to publicly narrate trauma and the drive to imagine another future. In the artist's own words, it was about a dilemma concentrated between an understanding of “modernity as a laboratory of art techniques”, and producing “images that were as unpleasant as the smell of a dead body.”
This activity marks the end of the exhibition Andrzej Wróblewski. Recto / Verso, the broadest retrospective thus far on the work of this artist outside of Poland.
In collaboration with
Adam Mickiewicz Institute, Warsaw, and Instituto Polaco de Cultura de Madrid
Participants
Marta Dziewańska. Research curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, with a PhD in philosophy from the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Alongside Eric de Chassey, she is also the curator of Andrzej Wróblewski. Recto/Verso (Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw and Museo Reina Sofía, 2015).
Ulrich Loock. An Independent curator and art critic, and previously the director of Kunsthalle Bern and Kunstmuseum Luzern and deputy director of the Serralves Foundation, Porto. He has also organised a wide range of exhibitions, as either an independent or institutional curator, for seminal painters from 1970 to the present day, including René Daniëls, Christopher Wool, Gerhard Richter, Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans.
Luc Tuymans. Artist. His work came to prominence internationally from the 1990s onwards and he has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Tate Modern (London, 2004), Moderna Museet (Malmö, 2009), Wexner Centre (Ohio, 2009), SFMoMA (San Francisco, 2009), Palaix des Beaux Arts (Brussels, 2011) and Haus der Kunst (Munich, 2008), among numerous other art centres. He also represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 2001, and his work can be found among the most illustrious collections, for instance the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Georges Pompidou Paris, the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
Andrzej Wajdá. Film-maker. A member of the Polish Film School and the director of over thirty fiction films, including the noteworthy trilogy Generation (1955), Kanal (1957) and Ashes and Diamonds (1958) on life in Poland during World War Two and construed as a monument to human resistance. His awards include the Palme d’Or at Cannes for Man of Iron (1981), and an Academy Award (1999) and the Golden Bear (2006) at the Berlin International Film Festival in honour of his lifetime achievements. He is also a reference point in world and Eastern European cinema.
![Andrzej Wróblewski, Szofer (Szofer niebieski) [Chauffeur (Blue Chauffeur)], 1948, Private collection, Warszaw © Courtesy Andrzej Wróblewski Foundation](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Exposiciones/05._szofer_szofer_niebieski_1948_dzirki_uprzejmoyci_fundacji_andrzeja_wroblewskiego.jpg.webp)
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Rethinking Guernica
Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
Situated Voices 36
Thursday, 16 October 2025 – 7pm
Territorio Doméstico is a feminist collective made up of female domestic and care workers who live in the Community of Madrid. They form a cross-border space which responds to a number of urgent problems: defending labour rights for female domestic workers and demanding the regularisation of migrant workers, as well as the right to family reunification, social recognition and the reparation of care debt by institutions.
The collective will provide accompaniment in this encounter by putting forward a cross-sectional round-table discussion centred on professional illnesses suffered by specific collectives of women doing jobs that are predominantly physical, such as care and domestic work and farm work. The aim is to shine a light on the physical and psychological tolls these body-oriented jobs take on the people that do them, in addition to the scant social, legal and healthcare recognition they receive.
Professional illnesses for women are often not recognised as such and are diagnosed simply as common illnesses, and with everything that entails on a legal and administrative level. Furthermore, obtaining sick leave can often become a huge struggle, thereby breaching labour rights.
The Museo Situado assembly convenes to discuss this reality, granting it the space it deserves to collectively call for solutions which respect the rights of all female worker.
Sven Lütticken
Friday, 10 October 2025 – 7pm
Academic disciplines are, effectively, disciplinary — they impose habits of thought, ideological parameters and, a priori, methodological parameters on those who have studied them. Yet what does being disciplined by art history mean? What has art history done to us? Further, what can we continue to do with it? The Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair, an annual programme organised by the Museo Reina Sofía which is devoted to reflecting on art history and historiography, and their limits and vanishing points, invites Sven Lütticken to explore these questions in light of different cases chosen by Lütticken and related to his own practice.
His work, framed inside art history and theory, has constantly championed expanding, interrogating and questioning the limits of discipline until it becomes theoretical and (self)critical. Throughout his trajectory, Lütticken has aligned his interest primarily towards historical, critical and theoretical research around autonomy. An important landmark in this working strand is his participation in the The Autonomy Project, an initiative from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven with different art schools and university departments and resulting in the published volume Art and Autonomy (Afterall, 2022). A second strand is made up of the long-term project Forms of Abstraction, which analyses contemporary artistic practices as interventions in forms of “real abstraction”, such as value-form, precisely as Marx theorised it.
Sven Lütticken will be a resident on Studies Constellation, the Museo Reina Sofía’s annual fellowship programme, and will work on the research project Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction.