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
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter II
8, 12, 15 January, 2026 – 16:00 to 19:00
As part of the Studies Constellation, the Study Directoship’s annual fellowship, art historian and theorist Sven Lütticken leads the seminar The (Legal) Person and the Legal Form: Theoretical, Artistic, and Activist Commitments to foster dialogue and deepen the hypotheses and questions driving his research project.
This project, titled Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction, explores the dominance of real abstractions—such as exchange value and legal form—over our processes of subjectivation, and asks how artistic practices can open up alternative ways of representing or performing the subject and their legal condition in the contemporary world.
The seminar consists of eight sessions, divided into three chapters throughout the academic year. While conceived as non-public spaces for discussion and collective work, these sessions complement, nourish, and amplify the public program of the Studies Constellation.
In this second chapter of the seminar, the inquiry into the aesthetics and politics of legal form continues with three sessions that pick up the discussions held in Chapter I but propose new lines of flight. The first session focuses on international law via the writings of the British author China Miéville, which allows us to reconsider the notion of the legal form –following Evgeny Pashukanis— and, through it, a variety of (people’s) tribunals. While the crucial concept of the legal person –as the right-holder central to the form of law— was debated in Chapter I, the second session focuses on attempts to extend personhood not (just) to corporations, but rather to nonhuman animals or ecosystems. Finally, the third session poses the question: how can groups and networks use officially recognized organizational forms (such as the foundation or the cooperative) and/or use a collective persona (without necessarily a legal “infrastructure” to match) to act and represent themselves?
Oliver Laxe. HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
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.
Manuel Correa. The Shape of Now
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
The third instalment of Cinema Commons, a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film articulates interpretive communities, fosters collective debate and devises proposals for common spaces, presents L’Abominable, an artist- and film-maker-run independent film-lab founded in 1996 on the outskirts of Paris. The programme is structured around three sessions: a lecture-workshop on L’Abominable, conducted by film-makers Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abominable; and the feature-length film Une île et une nuit (An Island and One Night), made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Better known by the shortened version of L’Abo, the artist-run laboratory emerged in response to disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and endeavours to offer the creative community a self-managed space in which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super8, 16mm and 35mm. With this underpinning, L’Abo champions the aesthetic and political experimentation of analogue cinema opposite digital hegemony.
L'Abominable, more than a simple work tool, has become a space of artistic and social exchange which has knitted together a community. It is characterised by endowing technique with a poetic dimension, in a community that manufactures its own film devices, and situates pedagogy at its core — the film-makers and artists train one another on common ground. Further, it seeks to forge an opening to all experimental languages around celluloid, for instance installation and film performance, while constituting a place of preservation and conservation in the history of the medium.
L'Abominable is an example of how, at the height of the digital age, artists and film-makers are recovering cinematography and vindicating the production process in its entirety. This autonomy invents alternative routes in the industry as it creates new tools, develops other forms of expression and explores unknown cinematic territories.