Held on 01 Mar 2018
The Jorge Oteiza Foundation and Museo Reina Sofía present the book Oteiza. Catálogo razonado de escultura (Oteiza. Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture), a critical survey of the work of the artist which compiles and analyses 2,752 pieces from public and private collections, including those which hold a prominent position in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collection 2: Is the War Over? Art in a Divided World (1945–1968). The book also sets forth a reflection on the notion of “cataloguing”, or “normalising”, an artist who forever evaded all normalisation.
The presentation features an introduction by Museo Reina Sofía director Manuel Borja-Villel and Gregorio Díaz Ereño, director of the Jorge Oteiza Foundation-Museum (to be substituted by Borja González, head of the Jorge Oteiza Museum-Foundation Study Centre, because of illness). This preamble will be followed by a round-table discussion between artist and teacher Txomin Badiola, the publication’s author and a specialist in the work of Jorge Oteiza, professor Dolores Jiménez-Blanco, and architect Rafael Moneo, chairman of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees and an expert on the artist’s oeuvre.
Jorge Oteiza (1908–2003) is a pivotal figure in the evolution of visual arts and twentieth-century aesthetics, as much for the decisive imprint he left on Latin American concrete sculpture as for the way he opened out towards a new sense of geometric abstraction in Europe during the predominance of Informalism. His art angles towards countless historical and contemporary ramifications, while possessing an irrepressible singularity which this catalogue raisonné — published in three versions, in Spanish, Basque and English – helps to unpack.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and the Fundación Oteiza
Participants
Manuel Borja-Villel. Director of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
Gregorio Díaz Ereño. Director of the Jorge Oteiza Museum-Foundation, substituted by Borja González Riera, head of the Jorge Oteiza Museum-Foundation Study Centre.
Txomin Badiola (Bilbao, 1957). His work and teaching in the world of artistic practice stretches back a long way, and his interest in the work of Jorge Oteiza in its entirety led him, in 1988, to curate the exhibition Oteiza. Propósito Experimental (Oteiza. Experimental Proposition), the first retrospective on the sculptor, displayed in Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao. Furthermore, he curated, with Margit Rowell, the exhibition Oteiza. Myth and Modernism, held at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (2004), New York’s Guggenheim Museum (2005) and the Museo Reina Sofía (2005), and is the author of the catalogue raisonné at the heart of this presentation. In 2015 he received the Gure Artea Award for his work, and in 2016 he was the subject of the retrospective Another Family Plot, at the Museo Reina Sofía.
Rafael Moneo (Tudela, 1937). During his years as a student at Madrid’s Advanced Technical School of Architecture, between 1956 and 1961, he worked with the architect Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza, who designed the building to the Oteiza Museum Foundation. Moneo was, along with Sáenz de Oiza and Juan Daniel Fullaondo, one of the first to acknowledge Jorge Oteiza’s contributions to architecture — expressed in his article Jorge de Oteiza, arquitecto, published in the magazine Nueva Forma in 1968. He was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1996 and since 2014 he has chaired the Board of Trustees of the Jorge Oteiza Foundation.
María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco Carrillo de Albornoz (Granada, 1959) is head professor of Art History at the Complutense University of Madrid and King Juan Carlos Chair at New York University. She is the author of Arte y Estado en la España del siglo XX (Art and State in Twentieth-Century Spain, Alianza, 1989) and has recently focused her studies in art on the 1940s and 1950s in Spain. Her exhibitions include Campo Cerrado. Spanish Art 1939–1953, on display at the Museo Reina Sofía in 2016.
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.
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.
Patricia Falguières
Tuesday May 12th 2026 – 19:00 h
Art historian Patricia Falguières inaugurates the María Luisa Caturla Chairwith the lecture Art History in Dark Times. This Chair, dedicated to the reflection on art in times «sick with uncertainty», is aimed at dismounting, digressing and imagining multiple temporalities and materialities in art history and cultural studies from an eccentric gaze, in the sense of being displaced, off-centre or with a centre that is different.
The lecture’s title references Hannah Arendt’s collection of essays Men in Dark Times, which in turn paraphrases a Bertol Brecht poem. In it, Arendt asserts «dark times are not only not new, they are no rarity in history».
Patricia Falguières also claims history knows many periods when the public realm has been obscured, when the world becomes so uncertain that people cease to ask anything of politics except to relieve them of the burden of their vital interests and their private freedom. The art historian —whose expertise is in the field of Renaissance art and philosophy but paying close attention to contemporaneity— invites us to a «chaotic and adventurous journey», from the Italian Renaissance to Fukushima, through which to delve into the questions: What can the practice of art history mean today, in a world ablaze with ominous glimmers and even more ominous threats, if not as mere entertainment or social ornament? Of what vital interests, of what freedom can it bear witness and serve as an instrument?