The Utopia of Form
Abstraction and Construction Between Latin America and Eastern Europe
Held on 16, 29 May, 06, 12, 13, 19, 20, 26 Jun 2017
This seminar, comprised of a series of lectures, addresses the transformations and surveys of modern utopia in post-war abstraction between Latin America and Eastern Europe. The series is connected with the exhibitions Kobro and Strzemiński. Avant-Garde Prototypes and Mário Pedrosa. On the Affective Nature of Form, and seeks to set forth new accounts of artistic modernity generated in contexts viewed to be at once peripheral, like Poland and Brazil after the Second World War, but central in the redefinition and potential of modernity from the 1940s onwards. Both margins would come into direct contact and have aesthetically mutual influences — pivotal to charting a new cultural map which avoids linking art centres to centres of power.
The prevailing historical narratives argues that the Second World War signaled a failure by the avant-garde art movements and their attempt to intervene in and transform the world; thus, in the post-Cold War period the abstract artist withdrew back into his own tragic, yet equally free subjectivity held sway. Although this thesis would explain the predominant poetics of Abstract Expressionism and Informalism in the USA and Western Europe, this same narrative also ignored the successive artistic readings of reality, produced without relinquishing the modern postulates of abstraction and formal experimentation. In Poland, Katarzyna Kobro approached constructivist sculpture from the physical presence of the body, a theme that would subsequently be taken up by Brazilian artist Lygia Clark from a clinical and therapeutic angle, with both artists shining a light on the successive departures from the art object, focusing on bodily experience and giving shape to a common practice in Concrete and Neo-Concrete movements in Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina. By the same token, the relationship between modernity and popular culture would gain new meaning from the dialogues between art, territory and ways of life. The art critic Mário Pedrosa synthesised this aspiration when, influenced by anti-psychiatry, he considered the art of the mentally ill – marginalised through their difference – as the new subject of modern utopia after the war. What are the characteristics, discourses and myths of this multiple and internationalist modernity? This seminar seeks to debate and analyse these questions across six lectures and case studies.
Programme
Tuesday, 16 May
Sabatini Building, Auditorium – 7pm
Yve-Alain Bois, in conversation with Olga Fernández. Notes on an Unrealised Project
Yve-Alain Bois is an art historian who has carried out one of the most rigorous and original examinations of modernity’s pivotal artists, such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian and Barnett Newman. Yet his analyses bring in elements which contradict this visual canon, for instance the presence of the body and language in abstraction and the modern grid, and, in the same vein, he has written about the onslaughts and transformations of the abstract model by artists such as Mathias Goeritz, Lygia Clark and Katarzyna Kobro. By considering their approaches, this conversation touches on the strengths and contradictions of the modern project.
Monday, 29 May
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200 – 7pm
Jarosław Suchan. Katarzyna Kobro and Lygia Clark. Body Politics in Peripheral Modernities
This lecture juxtaposes the works of Katarzyna Kobro and Lygia Clark, two artists who envisaged art as an instrument related to the body. According to Kobro, art must manufacture prototypes which, based on pictorial and sculptural forms, enable life and society to be organised. The individual’s plenitude and the state of wellbeing were also at the core of Lygia Clark’s artistic practice —in the Brazilian artist’s eyes, art must produce a multisensorial experience that allows the Cartesian predominance in our thinking to be abandoned. These two artistic practices and their alignment towards the fulfilment of the subject and society are analysed with respect to the peripheral forms of modernity and modernisation in which they were developed.
Tuesday, 6 June
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200 – 7pm
Mónica Amor. Non-Objects and Quasi-Objects: Notes on an Agenda of Research on the Edge of Modernity
In 1959, the Brazilian poet Ferreira Gullar coined the term “non-object”, alluding to the work of Neo-Concrete artists. The concept, which rejected the autonomy of the artwork, was formulated on the back of the decisive influence of the critic Mário Pedrosa and the emphasis he placed in his texts on the affective dimension of perceived forms. The “non-object” would put forward a series of proposals and questions centred around the object-subject relationship, thus profoundly transforming contemporary art. The lecture develops that the “non-object” today can offer an alternative to the white cube exhibition model which still predominates in modern art museums.
Tuesday, 13 June
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200 – 7pm
María Íñigo. The Other in Anthropophagy
Founded in Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto, 1928), anthropophagy alludes to the absorption and transformation (cannibalisation) of Western influences in Brazilian modernity. The term has had a wide development from its creation in 1928 to mock Eurocentrism until its contemporary role in the recognition of the post-colonial condition in Brazil, via a re-reading in the 1950s, its subsequent reactivation in the 1970s and its use in recent São Paulo Biennials. This lecture looks at the diverse types of Otherness produced at each juncture.
Tuesday, 20 June
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200 – 7pm
Luiza Nader. The Affection of Władysław Strzemiński: "To My friends, the Jews" (1945–1947)
This lecture surveys Władysław Strzemiński’s series To My Friends, the Jews, using contemporary theories of affection. From this ten-collage series, including documentary photography, drawings and handwritten texts, Luiza Nader touches on aspects such as guilt, shame, empathy and the link to Jewish victims in order to rethink the notion of solidarity and to interpret Strzemiński’s work as a symptom of a crisis in humanism and modern values.
Monday, 26 June
Sabatini Building, Auditorium – 7pm
Kaira Cabañas. Towards the Practice of Affective Modernity: Mário Pedrosa and the Gestalt Principles
What does observing psychiatric patients’ art mean to our understanding of modernity in Brazil? This lecture explores the theory of the psychology of form by the Brazilian critic Mário Pedrosa, whose early writings emphasise formal autonomy and his ideas on aesthetic response were integral to an understanding of Geometric Abstraction in the 1950s. Kaira Cabañas asserts that, through the Brazilian critic’s support of the creative work of doctor Nise da Silveira’s psychiatric patients, Pedrosa articulated an understanding of Geometric Abstraction as an affective and intimate language, surpassing the rational or purely visual.
In collaboration with
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Mónica Amor. Art historian. A professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, she is the author of Theories of the Non-object. Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, 1944-1969 (2016), and a regular contributor to Artforum, Grey Room, October and ARTMargins. She has curated the exhibitions Más allá del documento (Museo Reina Sofía, 2000), Gego: desafiando estructuras (Fundación Serralves, 2006) and Mexico: Expected/Unexpected (Le Maison Rouge, 2008).
Yve-Alain Bois. Art historian. A professor in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, he also lectured at the Johns Hopkins University and Harvard, where he was a lecturer in the Art History and Architecture Department. He is the author of a series of key texts which approach the critique and possibilities of modernity, for instance Painting as Model (1990), Formless: A User’s Guide (1997, with Rosalind Krauss), Matisse and Picasso (1998) and the volume, with Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (2006). Moreover, he has curated the exhibitions Piet Mondrian. A Retrospective (1994) and L´informe, mode d´emploi (1996). His latest project is the catalogue raisonné of Ellsworth Kelly.
Kaira Cabañas. Art historian. A professor at the University of Florida, Gainesville, she has also served as director of the M.A. in Modern Art: Critical & Curatorial Studies at the University of Columbia. She is the author of The Myth of Nouveau Réalisme: Art and the Performative in Postwar France (2013) and Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde (2015). In 2012, she curated show Specters of Artaud
Language and the Arts in the 1950s at the Museo Reina Sofía, and currently she is finalising the book Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art. She is also a regular contributor to the magazine Artforum.
Olga Fernández. Art historian. A professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, she is a member of the research project Modernidad(es) descentralizada(s). Arte, política y contracultura en el eje transatlántico durante la Guerra Fría. Her publications include "The Uncertainty of Display. Exhibitions In-Between Ethnography and Modernism” (2014) and "Simetrías y leves anacronismos: especulando sobre el arte moderno en América Latina” (2013). Furthermore, she has conducted research into the specifics of the exhibition medium and the critical potential of curatorial practice.
María Íñigo. Art historian. A visiting researcher at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, she has worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of São Paulo and a professor at the University of Essex and the Universidad Europea, Madrid, among others. Her work approaches the continuities of the colonial gaze in the study and exhibition of modern and contemporary art in Latin America.
Luiza Nader. Art historian. A professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, and president of the Polish section of AICA (the International Association of Art Critics). She is the author of the book Konceptualizm w PRL (Conceptualism in the People’s Republic of Poland, 2009) and has written about Władysław Strzemiński in several articles. Her book focused on the artist is currently in press.
Jaroslaw Suchan. Art historian, critic and curator. He has held positions as director of the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz since 2006, deputy director of the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle (Warsaw, 2002–2006) and director of the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery (Kraków, 1999–2002). He has curated a broad range of collective and solo exhibitions, including Tadeusz Kantor. Interior of Imagination (2005), Katarzyna Kobro/Lygia Clark (2008), Neoplastic Room. Open Composition (2010) and Kobro and Strzemiński. Avant-garde Prototypes (Museo Reina Sofía, 2017). Moreover, he is the author and editor of a number of texts on modern and contemporary art, most notably Władysław Strzemiński. Czytelność obrazów [Władysław Strzemiński: The Readability of Images, 2012].
![Katarzyna Kobro. Kompozycja przestrzenna (4) [Spatial Composition (4)], 1929. Oil and metal 40 x 64 x 40 cm. Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Exposiciones/kobro_1.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.