Collection. Contemporary Art: 1975-Present

In an era of extreme emotionality, the public exhibitionism of social media, and the blurring of boundaries between fiction and reality, affects are central to the production of meaning. Affective systems were crucially important for the first generation of conceptual artists, especially those creators linked to international second-wave feminism who brought women’s bodies into the public arena as the site for their work on representation. 

The new social presences in the 1970s also saw the emergence oflikewise unexplored affective relationalities, especially within society’s seemingly marginal spaces. The loving uses of the new sexual freedoms, thesystems of meaning that construct different subcultural communities, the intensity of new psychoactive substances and their addictions, and the proliferation of a shared, global image culture in late capitalism have had profound effects on the languages of art. 

In the mid-1980s, it was the AIDS pandemic, which hit Spain at the same time as a heroin epidemic, that shook the system of affects to its core. Grief, no longer felt individually but collectively, shared by groups of people who were complete strangers, became the norm of social experience. The world order transformed in 2001 by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the related Madrid bombings in 2004 produced a new reality in which fiction seemed to have triumphed over the real. And yet grief is a stubborn emotion and an especially useful tool as social glue; it can perhaps remind us of the purpose behind what unites us as a society. 

In the 1980s, as contemporary art expanded its affective capacities, it recovered a material condition that had been growing exponentially in previous decades. The primary affective sense is touch, and if each artistic period has its own overriding sense, this one is tactile, giving primacy to things and bodies. Objects are networks of relationships at a moment in time, crystallizing sociohistorical relations of production. Bodies are links for those relationalities. So isn’t the exhibition space a reality expressly designed for the encounter between bodies and things, in which to make those relationships legible and historical? 

This route is a sculptural gallery. Sculpture physically coexists in the same space as the visitor: it breaks down the barriers between fiction and reality. The new Spanish sculpture of the 1980s had an enormous international impact, especially through female artists such as Susana Solano and Cristina Iglesias. In recent years, a new generation of young female sculptors has again come to the fore internationally, representing the most significant contribution to present-day Spanish art.  

This path through the gallery empowers the visitor: to perceive transformations in the logic of the world’s objects and their relationships with people; to experience sculpture’s undeniable performativity, readable only in the act of moving beyond a singular perspective; to glimpse new materialities, forms that are still emerging and even speculative; and, lastly,to imagine fresh institutionalities through sculpture thanks to relational aesthetics, a set of artistic practices that require a community’s participation in order to be carried out. 

In the early 1980s, work began on building an institutional cultural fabric that sought to combine the living memory of the return from exile withthe international context. The Museo Reina Sofía was founded as an art center in Madrid’s former Hospital General de San Carlos in 1986.  

The emergence of a new and aspirational taste, the effects of institutionalization, and the opening of a new market resulted in unequal attention being paid to different artistic disciplines. Painting reached a pinnacle of critical enthusiasm in the late 1970s, culminating in a commercial explosion of its expressionist facet in the 1980s. Video art was nurtured in independent circles and its entry into institutions came late, but it sparked a renewal in forms of audiovisual production. Photography grew as a medium in both publishing and exhibition formats throughout the 1980s, becoming the preferred tool for revealing the constructed nature of reality in an image culture.  

As the 2000s progressed, the translation of conceptualism into criticism of representation consolidated the figure of the multidisciplinary artist, treated ironically in Carles Congost’s video that tells of the exploits of a soccer player who decides to abandon the sport to become a video artist. The symptoms of a need for renewing tradition and rectifying flagrant omissions in art history also serve to expand the boundaries of convention. As democratic institutions, museums respond to the efforts by new social presences to gain visibility within a contemporary art that was shaped by the identity-based conflicts that ravaged the twentieth century and that are III becoming a central aspect of social coexistence in the twenty-first century.