Oteiza

Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture

1 March, 2018 - 7pm
Free admission, until full capacity is reached
Place
Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Organized by
Museo Reina Sofía and the Fundación Oteiza
Jorge Oteiza. Desocupación de la esfera [The Disoccupation of the Sphere], 1957. Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza
Jorge Oteiza. Desocupación de la esfera [The Disoccupation of the Sphere], 1957. Fundación Museo Jorge Oteiza

The Jorge Oteiza Foundation and Museo Reina Sofía present the book Oteiza. Catálogo razonado de escultura (Oteiza. Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture), a critical survey of the work of the artist which compiles and analyses 2,752 pieces from public and private collections, including those which hold a prominent position in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collection 2: Is the War Over? Art in a Divided World (1945–1968). The book also sets forth a reflection on the notion of “cataloguing”, or “normalising”, an artist who forever evaded all normalisation.

The presentation features an introduction by Museo Reina Sofía director Manuel Borja-Villel and Gregorio Díaz Ereño, director of the Jorge Oteiza Foundation-Museum (to be substituted by Borja González, head of the Jorge Oteiza Museum-Foundation Study Centre, because of illness). This preamble will be followed by a round-table discussion between artist and teacher Txomin Badiola, the publication’s author and a specialist in the work of Jorge Oteiza­, professor Dolores Jiménez-Blanco, and architect Rafael Moneo, chairman of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees and an expert on the artist’s oeuvre.

Jorge Oteiza (1908–2003) is a pivotal figure in the evolution of visual arts and twentieth-century aesthetics, as much for the decisive imprint he left on Latin American concrete sculpture as for the way he opened out towards a new sense of geometric abstraction in Europe during the predominance of Informalism. His art angles towards countless historical and contemporary ramifications, while possessing an irrepressible singularity which this catalogue raisonné — published in three versions, in Spanish, Basque and English – helps to unpack.

Participants:

Manuel Borja-Villel. Director of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Gregorio Díaz Ereño. Director of the Jorge Oteiza Museum-Foundation, substituted by Borja González Riera, head of the Jorge Oteiza Museum-Foundation Study Centre.

Txomin Badiola (Bilbao, 1957). His work and teaching in the world of artistic practice stretches back a long way, and his interest in the work of Jorge Oteiza in its entirety led him, in 1988, to curate the exhibition Oteiza. Propósito Experimental (Oteiza. Experimental Proposition), the first retrospective on the sculptor, displayed in Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao. Furthermore, he curated, with Margit Rowell, the exhibition Oteiza. Myth and Modernism, held at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (2004), New York’s Guggenheim Museum (2005) and the Museo Reina Sofía (2005), and is the author of the catalogue raisonné at the heart of this presentation. In 2015 he received the Gure Artea Award for his work, and in 2016 he was the subject of the retrospective Another Family Plot, at the Museo Reina Sofía.

Rafael Moneo (Tudela, 1937). During his years as a student at Madrid’s Advanced Technical School of Architecture, between 1956 and 1961, he worked with the architect Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oiza, who designed the building to the Oteiza Museum Foundation. Moneo was, along with Sáenz de Oiza and Juan Daniel Fullaondo, one of the first to acknowledge Jorge Oteiza’s contributions to architecture — expressed in his article Jorge de Oteiza, arquitecto, published in the magazine Nueva Forma in 1968. He was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1996 and since 2014 he has chaired the Board of Trustees of the Jorge Oteiza Foundation. 

María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco Carrillo de Albornoz (Granada, 1959) is head professor of Art History at the Complutense University of Madrid and King Juan Carlos Chair at New York University. She is the author of Arte y Estado en la España del siglo XX (Art and State in Twentieth-Century Spain, Alianza, 1989) and has recently focused her studies in art on the 1940s and 1950s in Spain. Her exhibitions include Campo Cerrado. Spanish Art 1939–1953, on display at the Museo Reina Sofía in 2016.