Search

The Collection of Museo Reina Sofía starts with the end of the 19th Century, addressing the conflicts between a dominant Modernity, understood as progress, and its multiple discontents, as an ideology under constant challenge both in the social and the political fronts, and the cultural and artistic ones. The avant-garde, in its reinvention of the subject, of the public and of the art world, becomes the symptom of the new 20th Century. While Cubism defines the modern, ephemeral and multiple gaze, Dada and Surrealism free the subject from the moral and social repression, giving free reign to desire and to the social and individual unconscious.

On the fourth floor, the Collection covers the artistic transformations occurring in the post-war period, during the development of the tension-ridden international geopolitical scenario involving two different worlds and two antagonistic systems, the United States and the Soviet Union.

From June 27 to October 13, 2014, Madrid is to host the largest retrospective held to date on the British artist Richard Hamilton. The exhibition, organized by the Reina Sofía, was designed specifically for the Madrid museum by Hamilton himself, who became directly involved with the work when he visited the city in the early months of 2010.

Kerry James Marshall: painting and other stuff is the first major presentation in Europe of the work of this American artist (Birmingham, Alabama, 1955). Marshall is the author of an important body of figurative work in which he explores the themes of identity – national, gender, and especially racial identity – in an attempt to contextualize the Afro-American experience in today’s sociopolitical situation. The exhibition has been co-produced by four european museums: M HKA (Antwerp, Belgium), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhaguen, Denmark), Fundació Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona) and Museo Reina Sofía.

photobooks. Spain 1905-1977 is a history of Spanish photography through a selection of its best photobooks, many of them little known. The exhibition, organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), is the result of a line of acquisitions and research undertaken by the Museum’s Department of Collections with the collaboration of Horacio Fernández, curator of the exhibition.

The exhibition uses 300 artworks in very different formats (painting, sculpture, installations, video, photographie, graphic arts, film and papers) and the term playground to propose a historical-artistic look at play areas and their socializing, transgressive and political potential, from the beginning of modernity to our day. Making reference to the carnivalesque model as an irreverent and popular expression altering the established order, the exhibition explores the collective dimension of play as well as the social necessity of a space specifically for the construction of a new public sphere through artworks by Ensor, Goya, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Giacometti or Xabier Rivas. 

The exhibition The order of time and things. The home studio of Hanne Darboven brings together a large selection of pieces from the artist’s studio, showing, for the first time in a museum, the setting in which Darboven (Munich, 1941- Hamburg, 2009) worked.

The projects of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (Strasbourg, France, 1965) invite the visitor on a journey through spaces and times where literature becomes a habitual practice of inhabiting the world. The artwork is redefined as a process beyond the concrete significance of objects. Literature and theatre constitute strategies for the configuration of an imaginary where physical space is no more than the tip of an iceberg traced out by the viewer on both real and fictional coordinates.

Wols is one of the most intriguing figures in 20th-century art. Wols: Cosmos and Street does not attempt a survey of Wols’s work, nor a retrospective with a chronological structure. Instead, the exhibition presents his work in terms of two distinct kinds of ‘graphism’: one of the light (photography) and one of the line (drawing).

Biographies of Amos Gitai can be regarded as a case study within the framework of inquiry proposed by the exhibition Biographical Forms. Construction and Individual Mythology. Amos Gitai, born in Haifa in 1950, recently devoted two films to his parents, Carmel (2009) and Lullaby to My Father (2011). His mo­ther, Efratia Munschik Margalit (1909-2004), was born in Jaffa to Russian parents. His father, Munio Weinraub Gitai, (1909-1970), an architect trained at the Bauhaus, fled from Nazi Germany in 1933.

PROGRAMA FISURAS

El Museo Reina Sofía acoge, dentro de su Programa Fisuras, el último trabajo de Tracey Rose (Durban, Sudáfrica, 1974), un proyecto inédito titulado (x) y que supone la primera incursión en solitario de la artista en España, conocida por sus instalaciones, performances y fotografías.

La muestra consta de una videoinstalación y de un conjunto de piezas lumínicas, acústicas y cromáticas.

Ghosts, Brides and other Companions is the first exhibition in Spain by the artist Elly Strik (The Hague, Netherlands, 1961). The show,which combines new work and earlier productions, is designed specifically for display at the Museo Reina Sofía. In her artistic career, Elly Strik has been particularly interested in those visionary artists who probe beyond the thresholds of human nature, such as James Ensor and Francisco de Goya.

History of the art is not only done by historians, but by the own artists. The aim of this exhibition is to examine the biographical forms in the modern art and will assemble 275 works (paintings, sculptures, photos, extracts of movies, etc.) from Gérard de Nerval, Edvard Munch, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Claude Cahun, Francesca Woodman, Phillip Guston or Jeff Wall, Frank Kafka, Tadeusz Kantor or Robert Bresson.

Idea: Painting-Force presents a set of works produced in Spain between the years 1976 and 1984, a historical period of profound social and cultural transformations. The exhibition looks at a specific situation of the Spanish artistic scene, in which the crisis of the avant-garde and of the idea of modernity becomes visible through the pictorial practice, understood as a territory for thought and the production of creative strategies, of the five artists represented: Alfonso Albacete, Miguel Ángel Campano, Ferran Garcia Sevilla, Juan Navarro Baldeweg and Manolo Quejido.