Collections

Modernity bears a relation to a series of territories that were conducive to new developments and consolidations in the early decades of the twentieth century, a period that would witness a flurry of changes. The city was fast becoming a locus of thought, conflict and artistic creation — Paris, Madrid and Barcelona were not only centres of artistic production but also stages, where architecture and urbanism illustrated the growth of major cities and responses to new social, labour and demographic challenges in a world indelibly marked by colonialism and industrialisation. Magazines, for their part, became that unofficial space offering a key element missing from galleries, salons and museums: spaces of encounter and discussion which, with swift and inexpensive dissemination, demonstrated they were capable of transcending physical frontiers to foster the emergence of invisible communities and the contact and exchange among individuals across different geographical coordinates.

As the 1930s set in, the social and political events that converged in the pre-war escalation leading to the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War impelled numerous artists to take a public stance, turning not just their art but also their locations and means of dissemination into places which transformed society, the body and consciousness.

This chapter from the Collection presents a critical narration of modernity around these three foundations, understanding it less as a cultural continuum which culminates in the present and more as a succession of discontinuities, possibilities and attempts that must be read from a present-day context. 

In the late 1960s, minimalism endowed sculpture with a new formal repertoire based on elemental geometric forms, giving rise, moreover, to a new way of understanding the relationship between artwork and spectator. Contemporary sculpture is phenomenological, conceived as an instrument to interpret the space it occupies and requiring the moving perception of visitors’ bodies to be able to work.

Within the Museo Reina Sofía Collection are significant geometric sculptures from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, their rational forms becoming an elemental language in cities’ public spaces, the signs of a new economy in which culture shared a new value system. The development of contemporary urbanism was coupled with this aesthetic of technological utopia and absolute confidence in the future, an affirmative condition of sculpture which would make it an emblem of economic capital that sought representation through the vertical growth of corporate buildings and the seductive sheen of glazed mirrors as curtain walls. At the same time, however, it materialised into a stereotype that has obstructed the view of the major contributions of this generation of sculptors. In addition to the utopia of an international taste that had already been a dream of the avant-garde was a changing demand for greater collective participation in public space. These sculptors are, therefore, examples of this force of transformation.