Multimedia

Poetry lecture by Ben Okri on the opening of Elly Strik. Ghosts, Brides and other Companions, on January 22, 2014.

The year of construction of the Palacio de Cristal, 1887, is also the year of many events such as the construction of the Eiffel Tower, the birth of Le Corbusier, the invention of the gramophone ... a century in which the production conditions change, industrial production starts, and objects, that start losing their specificity because of the mass production, led to the emerge of some ideas like inner monologue, free verse or more open forms of theater.

Guy Brett, the curator of the show Wols: Cosmos and Street, talks about this new approach to the work of the German artist, not only about his drawings and paintings, but also about his lesser known photographs.

For Amos Gitai, the documentary is human archaeology, whereas fiction is architecture. In this exhibition, the Middle East, his parents, and his family memories intermingle with his oeuvre, transcending into physical, audiovisual space, as well as dealing with the multilayered reality which conforms the current sociopolitical landscape.

Artist Elly Strik talks in this video about the influence of Goya and Freud in her work, as well as the personal connection between her artistic production, her memories and her body. The exhibition Elly Strik. Ghosts, Brides and other Companions, conceived specifically for the galleries of Museo Reina Sofía explores, through drawings on paper with graphite and oil, the potential of physical metamorphosis processes in parallel with the artistic creation process.

Armando Montesinos, curator of the exhibition, explains in this interview the keys of Idea: Painting-Force. The works of Alfonso Albacete, Miguel Ángel Campano, Ferran Garcia Sevilla, Juan Navarro Baldeweg and Manolo Quejido, dating from 1978 to 1984, comprise the proposal put forward in the exhibition in Palacio de Velázquez, Parque del Retiro. They carried out this activity at the height of the crisis affecting the modern movement and the idea of the avant-garde. Plus, they were working in Spain, in a setting that, on the hinge between the 70s and the 80s, was experiencing some newly-arrived democratic liberties and whose artistic scene had derived from the dominant acritical formalism to the emergence of the market and the aesthetics of success.

In this video, Manuel Borja-Villel, the director of the Museum, explains how this exhibition takes a close look at art produced in Spain and abroad during the 1980s and 1990s. Minimal Resistance centres on the search by artists of new spaces for resistance in a globalised world and it examines a series of dualities that polarized the period covered: from the global economic crisis to financial capitalism, from the potential of the collective to the recovery of the myth of the artist, from actions claiming public space to discourses around memory and the body, from a kind of theatricality emphasising scenography and architecture to performative languages and relational models and from the restoration of traditional genres to the appropriation of images from mass media and mass culture.