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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)
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.
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
equipoMotor
Jueves alternos, 23 de octubre, 2025 - 11 de junio, 2026 - 17:30 h
El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.
Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.
El programa se estructura en bloques temáticos sobre lo freak como metodología, el trabajo cultural, la intergeneracionalidad y la diversidad territorial. Cada bloque a su vez se despliega en sesiones que combinan disparadores teóricos y estéticos, visitas a exposiciones y espacios liminales del Museo, talleres artísticos con artistas, ejercicios de curaduría audiovisual colectiva y de relatoría radiofónica, así como instancias de activación pública, mediante proyecciones de cine experimental y coloquios compartidos con el público, en complicidad con el archivo Hamaca y el Área de Cine y Nuevos Medios del Museo.
De este modo, la presente edición incorpora una particularidad: el grupo de participantes irá transformándose en un «colectivo curatorial audiovisual temporalmente autónomo», con capacidad de incidir en la programación del Museo y de abrir la conversación de equipoMotor al público general, cuestionando y expandiendo así los límites entre las cabezas que deciden, las manos que producen y los cuerpos y presencias que habitan la institución. Las personas seleccionadas en la modalidad oyente serán invitadas a las proyecciones públicas, así como a otras activaciones y momentos de apertura del equipoMotor.
Frente al relato de un museo homogéneo, pulcro y lineal, apostamos por un Museo disidente, contradictorio y lleno de vida residual. Un Museo que no tema hacerse preguntas incómodas ni mostrar sus cicatrices. equipoMotor. Un poco más Frankenstein no busca repensar el cuerpo de la institución, sino habitarlo en sus desgarros, tal como es: híbrido, inacabado, infecto, fantasmagórico… y cargado de esporas y chispas por venir.