Room 16

Video emerged in the mid-1960s with the release of a home recording system with magnetic sound on the North American market. During its early years, the main driving force behind video was the television industry, but its use by artists became widespread in the first half of the 1970s in the form of documentaries, electronic experimentation, and performative recordings of conceptual art. 

La imagen sublime (The Sublime Image) was the first exhibition the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Reina Sofía Art Center) organized dedicated to video art. Curated by Manuel Palacio, it traced the history of video art in Spain from 1970 to 1987, the year the exhibition opened. The show brought together more than thirty works by artists such as Antoni Miralda, Alfonso Albacete, Juan Carlos Eguillor, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Eugènia Balcells, Antoni Muntadas, and El Hortelano. The pieces in this exhibition formed the genesis of the audiovisual works in the museum’s current collection.