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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)
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The final session in this Moon Projector season contemplates the feeling around the first experience of cinema — cinema as revelation, magic, fantasy and mystery from the first gaze, from the first contact with the medium, and imagery etched on the retina of childhood. The programme shows Émile Cohl’s landmark Fantasmagorie (1908), the first ever hand-drawn animation, and Ignacio Agüero’s Cien niños esperando un tren (One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train, 1988), a feature-length film on play and the origins of cinema.
Fantasmagorie (1908)by Émile Cohl (Paris, 1857– Villejuif, 1938) is the first expression in the history of animated drawing. Émile Cohl was an illustrator who belonged to the Parisian art group Arts incohérents (1882–1895), who was bestowed with an absurdist and pre-Surrealist talent. Whereas the Lumière brothers were able get audiences out of their seats as they witnessed a train moving towards them in 1895, Fantasmagorie is a supernatural experience, akin to an apparition yet also innocuous and entertaining — the inanimate comes to life out of nothing and figures seemingly move with little sense. From the outset, animation was related to caricature, fabulation and the comical, a sweet spot for the dreams of the youngest audience.
From the discovery of new imagery arising from the animated line to knowledge of the world through a screen, Cien niños esperando un tren (1988), by Chilean director Ignacio Agüero (Santiago, 1952), narrates a group of young people’s discovery of cinema in a workshop on the origins of the medium in a poverty-stricken town on the outskirts of Santiago de Chile. Play, fun and learning combine with a fascination with images, as viewing Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) in the workshop becomes an act of freedom.
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.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practicecontinues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the showsorganised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
International Museum Day 2026 with Radio 3
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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.