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First session: Wednesday, 19 June / Second session: Wednesday, 26 June
Session 1
Josep Renau
La construcción del Canal de Suez (Constructing the Suez Canal)
Mexico, 1952–1955, b/w, 35mm transferred to digital, 1’La tercera dimensión (The Third Dimension, report in Cine-Revista)
Mexico, 1952–1955, b/w, 35mm transferred to digital, 3’Credits from Cine Verdad
Mexico, 1956, b/w, 35mm transferred to digital, 1’Manuel Barbachano
Nuevos timbres (New Timbres, report in Cine-Revista)
Mexico, 1953, b/w, 35mm transferred to digital, 2’Josep Renau
Zeitgezeichnet 3. Ein hartnäckiges Volk (Topical Drawings 3. Stubborn People)
Germany, 1958, b/w, 35mm transferred to digital, 8’Zeitgezeichnet 2. Stürmische Zeit (Topical Drawings 2. Tempestuous Times)
Germany, 1958, b/w, 35mm transferred to digital, 12’Zeitgezeichnet 4 (Topical Drawings 4)
Germany, 1958, b/w, 35mm transferred to digital, 9’Zeitgezeichnet 1. Eine fruchtbare Wüste (Topical Drawings 1. A Fertile Desert)
Germany, 1958, b/w, silent, 35mm transferred to digital, 7’Zeitgezeichnet. Politisches Poem (Topical Drawings. Political Poem)
Germany, 1958, b/w, silent, 35mm transferred to digital, 7’In the first session, the series is presented by its curators, Chema González and Luis E. Parés.
This session features screenings of films Renau made in Mexico and the short films he directed in East Germany. His new life of exile in Mexico is recounted by his friend Manuel Barbachano in Nuevos timbres (New Timbres) through his participation in a competition to renew the picture-postcard image of the nation. Renau contributed to the country’s powerful audiovisual industry with anonymous and fragmented, yet remarkably unique, contributions. La tercera dimension (The Third Dimension), the only Mexican graphic reportage piece to be recovered in full, is a story of perspective in visual arts; the credits designed for the news broadcast Cine Verdad (Cinema Truth), with a large, all-knowing mechanical eye, are an homage to Dziga Vertov and Soviet documentary film-making, while the animation of La construcción del Canal de Suez (Constructing the Suez Canal) points to a particular genre, dubbed “graphic film” by the artist, which would be fully realised in East Germany. It was there that he would make his own television programme Zeitgezeichchne (Topical Drawings), in which he used this new visual and filmic medium to transcend the static language of drawing, harnessing graphic illustration through information. Renau’s “graphic films”, characterised as a hybrid of animation, documentary records and the aesthetics of agitprop, are screened for the first time in this session and constitute a fascinating and original discovery in the avant-garde, visual arts, technology and mass media.
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First session: Thursday, 20 June / Second session: Thursday, 27 June
Session 2
Josep Renau
Petrograd 1917 ( Lenin Poem)
Germany, 1960, b/w, silent, 35mm transferred to digital, 14’Deutsche Fernsehfunk
The American Way of Life. Ein Berich über die amerikanische Lebenswelt mit Fotomontagen von José Renau (A Report on the American Way of Life with Photomontages by José Renau)
Germany, 1962, b/w, 35mm transferred to digital, 25’Petrograd 1917 (named Lenin Poem by Renau in his creative process and appearing in this form in many publications) is an animation piece which, although incomplete, was the most ambitious of all the “graphic film” projects the film-maker undertook in East Germany, in which he mixed animation techniques with revolutionary graphic art from the 1920s. What is conserved here is without sound, although we do know that music was intended for the film and Renau had negotiated with Hans Eisler to compose a music score. In 1961, after being unable to finish the film the way he wanted due to disagreements with the director of German state television, Deutsche Fernsehfunk, Renau gave up on his work with the broadcaster. This session also features the screening of The American Way of Life (1962), an unreleased report by Deutsche Fernsehfunk on Renau and his most famous series of photomontages, in which the film-maker describes both his artistic process and the ideology that led him to produce the work.
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First session: Friday, 21 June / Second session: Friday, 28 June
Session 3
Eva Vizcarra, Rafael Casañ
Josep Renau. El arte en peligro (Josep Renau. Art in Danger)
Spain, 2018, colour, DVD, 78’In the first session, the film will be presented by its directors, Eva Vizcarra and Rafael Casañ.
Josep Renau. El arte en peligro (Josep Renau. Art in Danger) is, thus far, the most complete audiovisual approach to this multifaceted and indefatigable figure. Shot in Valencia and Germany, the film takes the viewer around the streets of Cabañal, the scene of the artist’s childhood, before travelling to the erstwhile German Democratic Republic and contemplating the monumental murals he made in the early 1970s – still conserved in the city of Halle, formerly Halle-Neustandt. The film profoundly explores his period of exile, delving into the living contradiction of an artist always searching for revolution, even at the expense of not accepting its disappointments. It also assembles the voices and testimonies of artist Marta Hoffman, a friend of Renau’s; José Miguel G. Cortés, director of the Valencian Institute of Modern Art; his biographer, Fernando Bellón; art critic Manuel García; and Doro Balaguer, a friend and the creator of the Josep Renau Foundation, as well as numerous others.
Renau, Film-maker
![Josep Renau. Zeitgezeichnet 4 [Dibujos de actualidad 4]. Película, 1958. Fuente: fotograma de la película Josep Renau. El arte en peligro, Eva Vizcarra y Rafael Casañ, 2018](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/renau-g_0.gif.webp)
Held on 19, 26 Jun 2019
The Museo Reina Sofía presents the first retrospective on the film work of Josep Renau during his time in exile. This output, chiefly shown for the first time on this occasion, has been recovered after a long research into German and Mexican audiovisual archives. Renau's film work concentrates the poetics of Spanish exile, the synthesis between visual arts and information into the newsreel genre and the attempt to think drawing as a mass media.
Few figures are as relevant to the historical avant-garde movements and origins of twentieth-century Spanish culture as Josep Renau (1907–1982), a pivotal creator in every sphere he carried out his practice as an artist, theorist and agent. Nonetheless, his film output is virtually unknown and would become paradigmatic during his exile, and, despite his ties to cinema as a poster artist and importer of photomontage in Spain, his relationship with the medium stretches even further. In Russian cinema, which he introduced to Spain during the Civil War, Renau saw a genuine ethical and aesthetic model for art, drawing inspiration from the essays of theorists such as Vsevolod Pudovkin for his montages, and writing articles, particularly pieces in which he could put forward his opinions. Moreover, he never saw his film-making being at odds with the rest of his visual work, and directing films was vital at certain points of his life, to the extent that it practically dominated his oeuvre in the first four years of his time in Berlin.
During his exile in Mexico, Renau made at least five short films for the producer Manuel Barbachano Ponce, who had given work in his production company to different friends and artists who had fled the Civil War, for instance Jomi García Ascot (1927–1986), Carlos Velo (1909–1988) and Walter Reuter (1906–2005). In Mexico, he experimented with the moving image in his films, coining the concept “graphic film” to describe his personal approach to animated film, which, in turn, gave rise to his political vignettes.
In 1958 he moved to Berlin and started to work in the East German audiovisual industry, his first works caricatured observations on current affairs, in which he employed drawings on glass to create an interesting hybrid of animation and a filmic record, tracing the footprints of The Mystery of Picasso, by Henri-Georges Clouzot (1956). These would be followed by more personal films which, unfortunately, he never finished, and which reach us now in different states of conservation. Of these “graphic film” projects the most important, and the most complete due to Renau’s motivation and commitment towards it, is Lenin Poem (1959).
Josep Renau’s film output has always appeared as a curious side note in the studies devoted to his work: because some of the films were never finished and others disappeared, today establishing a reasoned filmography of his work remains a difficult task. Nevertheless, the few films of his that have reached us constitute, just as his graphic work does, a melting pot of political, ethical and aesthetic concerns worthy of further consideration. From a present-day perspective, these films are congruent with his artistic and political thinking: on the one hand, they are directly linked to mid-twentieth-century revolutionary imagery and work as a social critique and aesthetic counterweight; and, on the other, the use of a mass-media medium such as animated film enables political ideas to be disseminated whilst moving away from the idea of the unique artwork, acquired and collected, that Renau unflinchingly rejected. The interpretation of the political climate also meant these “graphic films” portrayed the cosmopolitan and committed sensibility of Spanish artists in exile.
Curatorship
Luis E. Parés and Chema González
Acknowledgements:
Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv (DRA), Radiotelevisión Española (RTVE)
Itinerary
Cineteca Nacional and CCEMex (Centro Cultural de España en México), México DF (18 - 20 february, 2020)
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Itinerancies
Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid
19 June, 2019 - 28 June, 2019
Cineteca Nacional y CCEMex (Centro Cultural de España en México), México DF
19 June, 2019 - 28 June, 2019
Más actividades
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
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 practice continues 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 shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.