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The work of Beatriz González (Bucaramanga, 1938), widely regarded as one of the seminal artists from the Colombian art scene, occupies a unique place in the history of Latin American art — not only is she a pioneer of Pop Art, but also, almost without calculation, an incisive and coherent chronicler of recent Colombian history. Setting out from the anonymous quote “art relates what history cannot” — used frequently by the artist — her work orbits around memory; memory not as a pretext for nostalgia, but, on the other end of the scale, something tightly bound to the present. González draws inspiration from the mass media, engaging in dialogue with popular narratives and formal painting, or appropriating press photographs, reinterpreting them through drawing, painting, graphic art and sculpture.

The exhibition Pessoa. All Art Is a Form of Literature takes its title from a quote by Álvaro de Campos, one of the most avant-garde heteronyms created by Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon, 1888–1935), and published in the influential Portuguese magazine presença.

Paulism, Intersectionism, Sensacionism are just some of the terms coined by the poet in his scores of texts, and underpin the idiosyncrasies of Portuguese modernity. This exhibition, therefore, draws on these isms to put in place a visual account of the Portuguese scene, bringing together a selection of works by figures such as José de Almada Negreiros, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Eduardo Viana, Sarah Affonso and Júlio, among others, to focus on the first aesthetic currents in Portugal from the turn of the 20th century to 1935.

The union of the Telefónica Cubist Collection and the cubist holdings at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia supports this plural conception of the cubist experience. The union of the two collections also brings the work of Juan Gris to the fore in both the exhibition and the narrative. Thinking about the cubist experience inevitably means thinking about the pervasiveness of the work of Picasso and Braque. But at this point in time, it is not only legitimate and possible to reconsider the cubist experience from the perspective of the formulations of Juan Gris, it is also desirable, because it means recognising the complexity of the true nature of Cubism.

Rosa Barba (Agrigento, Italy, 1972) uses the medium of the cinema, from its devices and materiality to the temporalities it summons up, to explore the mechanisms that articulate our era, when any possibility of rupture can stem only from the recognition of a society where the difference between productive work and creativity is non-existent, and where our dependence on technology and gadgets is almost absolute. Through misadjustments, paradoxes and displacements, the artist reveals the composition of narratives and the apparatuses which make them possible. Her films and installations destabilize grand narratives and propose other perceptions of the real where framing and ciphering technologies –­that is, apparatuses– are revealed as an essential part of the organization of our subjectivities, emotions and experiences.

The exhibition William Kentridge. Enough and more than enough focuses on his stage work, including theatre, opera and performance, and takes this perspective to approach his sculptural projects.

William Kentridge, artist, Soledad Liaño, curator and Manuel Borja-Villel, director of Museo Reina Sofía, talk about the exhibition.

Esther Ferrer, artist and Laurence Rassel, co-curator talk about the exhibition devoted to the work of a pioneer and one of the foremost representatives of performance art in Spain

Soledad Lorenzo, Salvador Nadales y Manuel Borja-Villel, talk about this exhibition that sets forth a broad selection of works comprising the temporary loan made by the gallerist Soledad Lorenzo to the Museo Reina Sofía in 2014.

Meeting Point, deals with concepts of space and geometry from different optics. With its point of departure set through two artists which are at the core of the Soledad Lorenzo Collection — Pablo Palazuelo and Antoni Tàpies — this survey spans in different formats by eminent artists with ties to the gallerist’s career, for instance Soledad Sevilla, Ángeles Marcos and the so-called Basque Group (Txomin Badiola, Peio Irazu, Sergio Prego and Jon Mikel Euba).

Brian Walker, co-curator of the exhibition and Manuel Borja-Villel, director of Museo Reina Sofía, talk about George Herriman's show.

The work of Herriman came into being alongside the progress of the comic as a new artistic language surfacing in the USA at the tail end of the nineteenth century. This new medium brought with it a series of visual discoveries based on the repetition of drawings and patterns which, at this early stage, denoted a major narrative accomplishment. His most popular creation, the comic strip Krazy Kat (1913–1944), lauded by The Comics Journal as the century’s finest comic creation.

Doris Salcedo and Manuel Borja-Villel, talk about the exhibition at Palacio de Cristal. The work of Doris Salcedo (Bogotá, 1958) is deeply rooted in the social and political circumstances of her native Colombia, although she does occasionally address problems in other contexts — a case in point being the project she has devised for the Palacio de Cristal. Time and again, her work sets out from rigorous research as she employs sculpture and installation to approach situations of conflict, with violence and its victims, memory and forgetting ever-present. Salcedo’s use of everyday materials and personal objects often takes on a sinister quality to evoke the absence of those people they are related to, or those to which they belong: missing persons, refugees, people who have been murdered or forgotten… Her pieces — poetic, fragile, beautiful — encompass drama, trauma and violence, often working as remembrance or homage, mourning for the living and, above all, people who die forgotten.

Throughout her career as a performer and composer, Joan La Barbara, a hugely influential figure in the sphere of contemporary experimental music, has explored the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument, developing a true and signature vocabulary of experimental techniques. She uses these techniques to explore the potential range of timbres in a single pitch, circular breathing inspired by French horn playing, and multiphonics, in addition to recovering classics such as choral singing.

The present exhibition is the first retrospective in Spain on the artist group NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) [New Slovenian Art], which spearheaded one of the most important experiences in the culture that materialised in 1980s Yugoslavia, during the Cold War.

The show, entitled NSK from Kapital to Capital, displays a wealth of material on the group’s work in its different manifestations: public acts, concerts, exhibitions, theatre productions, performances, manifestos, interviews and numerous documents and testimonies.

The Brazilian Mário Pedrosa (Pernambuco, 1900 – Rio de Janeiro, 1981) was one of the most important Latin American thinkers of the 20th century. Pedrosa incarnates the paradigm of the public intellectual committed to the debate on the future of society in both cultural and political terms.

The current exhibition is intended as a tribute to Mário Pedrosa through a selection of Brazilian and international art that responds to some of the artistic questions he addressed at different points in his intellectual production.

A Place for the Body, the first major anthological exhibition to be held in Spain on Franz Erhard Walther, presents a large number of sculptures, drawings, paintings, photographic documentation and archive material from the whole of his career. The exhibition is articulated around the two main themes of action and language.

Are there continuities between Guernica and the strange, often agonized vision of humanity that Picasso had set forth over the preceding decade? How did Picasso’s distinctive set of concerns, which at moments seem dark to the point of despair, inform his final picture of women and animals in pain? Curators T.J Clark and Anne Wagner, along with Manuel Borja-Villel, director of Museo Reina Sofía, explain the key elements of the exhibition.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is interviewed a few weeks before the opening of the exhibition tributed to him at the Petit Palais of Paris. Asked for which of his works or era he would choose to survive him, Picasso avoids responding directly, pointing out that each work is the result of a moment, a circumstance and a mood. Nevertheless, he immediately mentions Guernica (1937), as an example that illustrates his answer: behind the picture, there is a war. Picasso's Guernica, like the rest of his work, can not be explained from the interpretation of the signs or from the greater or lesser success that he obtains, but each work constitutes a page of a great notebook of memories and notes, his own biography, where the personal is inseparable from the artistic.

Interview with Pablo Picasso. In: Panorama, October 21, 1966.
Office national de radiodiffusion télévision française.

Rudolf Frieling and Gary Garrels, curators of the exhibition Bruce Conner. It's All True, and Manuel Borja-Villel, Director of Museo Reina Sofía, talk about one of the most pre-eminent American artists from the second half of the twentieth century. Conner’s work emerged from the California art scene and addressed wide-ranging questions concerning American society in the post-war era: from the burgeoning consumer culture to the dread of nuclear apocalypse. In his work he cultivated alternate mediums - now the hallmarks of 21st-century art - adopting different techniques and often creating hybrid pieces midway between painting and sculpture, film and performance, drawing and printing.

Till Fellrath, co-curator of the exhibition and Manuel Borja-Villel, director of Museo Reina Sofía, introduce this first monographic show on the activity of the Art et Liberté Group, a collective of artists working out of Cairo during World War Two. The exhibition comprises a selection of around one hundred pictorial works and a range of photographic and documentary materials.
The Art et Liberté Group, founded by Georges Henein, Ramses Younan, Kamel El-Telmissany and Fouad Kamel, cultivated a vernacular artistic practice bound to Surrealism and international artistic debate.

The line is the primary formulation in the imaginary of Anne-Marie Schneider (Chauny, France, 1962), in which autobiographical activity also has a strong presence. The line refers to gestural writing and gives shape to the enigmatic world of personages whose bodies are often taken apart and fitted back together in fragments, prolonged in domestic space and projected on to the landscape.