150 Years of Joaquín Torres García

This year marks the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Joaquín Torres García (Montevideo, 1874–1949), one of the foremost artists in a rereading of modernity from the South. To commemorate this landmark year, the Museo Reina Sofía and the Embassy of Uruguay organise a round-table discussion centred on his career and relevance, featuring the participation of art historians Juan Manuel Bonet and Andrea Giunta, Alejandro Díaz Lageard, director of the Museo Torres García, and the artist Ana Tiscornia. It also includes a presentation by Ana Teresa Ayala, a Uruguayan ambassador to Spain, and Manuel Segade, the director of the Museo Reina Sofía.         

Torres García, whose work is part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection, is the founder of an art movement called Constructive Universalism, comprising Indigenous and popular roots within the structure of constructivist language. Through this current, the artist put forward a synthesis between the rational and the spiritual, the contemporary and the ancestral, and between North and South, offering a mode of seeing, understanding and representing modernity from Latin America. Furthermore, he was an artist-educator and the founder of art schools which would influence the cultural and artistic development of Uruguay and the region, for instance the Taller Torres García in Montevideo, a pedagogical endeavour combining craft and the avant-garde of Bauhaus and the Black Mountain College. On account of his adaptation of constructivist abstraction to a Latin American language and his educational work, Torres García today represents a contemporary paradigm of the internationalist artist from the South, the educator and someone with a profound awareness of his own identity.    

During the round-table, Juan Manuel Bonet will explore Torres García’s relationship with Spain; Andrea Giunta will examine the artist’s relevance by fixing the gaze on a specific work; Alejandro Díaz Lageard will speak of the new edition of the Constructive Universalism manifesto and the currency of the proposal; and Ana Tiscornia will comment on the generational relationship she and a group of international Latin American artists from the 1970s have with Torres García. Attendants will be offered a drink upon the activity’s conclusion, courtesy of the Embassy of Uruguay.   

Participants

Ana Teresa Ayala has been a Uruguayan ambassador to Spain since October 2020, undertaking wide-ranging work to promote the bilateral relations between Uruguay and Spain and thus fostering agreements in education and international cooperation.  

Juan Manuel Bonet is an art historian, writer and art and literary critic. He was the director of the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM) from 1995 to 2000 and director of the Museo Reina Sofía from 2000 to 2004, in addition to the director of the Instituto Cervantes in Paris from 2012 to 2018. He is currently the president of the Rafael Cansinos Assens Archive Foundation and the International Committee of the Vicente Huidobro Foundation. Moreover, he is the author of the reference work Diccionario de las vanguardias en España (1907-1936) and is a specialist in the history of early modernity in Spain, the subject of numerous exhibitions he has curated.        

Alejandro Díaz Lageard is the director and curator of the Museo Torres García and a member of the foundation under the same name. He has organised over twenty exhibitions on the work of Joaquín Torres García in museums in Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Spain, and is the managing editor of the museum’s publications. He also jointly wrote the script to the feature-length film PAX IN LUCEM (2024), a documentary on the work of the artist.

Andrea Giunta is an art historian. A lecturer in modern and contemporary art (twentieth and twenty-first centuries) and art from Latin America and the Caribbean (from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century) at the University of Buenos Aires, she has published essays that most notably include Vanguardia, internacionalismo y política. Arte argentino de los sesenta (Siglo XXI, 2001), Escribir las imágenes. Ensayos sobre arte argentino y latinoamericano (Siglo XXI, 2011) and Feminismo y arte latinoamericano. Historias de artistas que emanciparon el cuerpo (Siglo XXI, 2018). Moreover, she has curated exhibitions such as Mercosur Biennial 12: Feminine(s): Visualities, Actions and Affections (2020) and, with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, at the Hammer Museum, Brooklyn Museum and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2017–2019). 

Manuel Segade is the director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Ana Tiscornia is an artist and lecturer. An emeritus professor at the State University of New York (SUNY), she is one of the most internationally renowned Uruguayan artists. She has received awards and honours such as the Konex Mercosur Award (2022), the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2004) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2000), and also represented Uruguay at the Second and Ninth Havana Biennials and the Third Biennial of Lima, as well as participating at the Fourth Biennial of the End of the World in Mar del Plata, Argentina. Her work has been exhibited in Latin America, the USA and Europe. She is the author of Vicissitudes of the Visual Imaginary: Between Utopia and Fragmented Identity (White Wine Press, 2007).