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)
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
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.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.