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A key figure in Mexican conceptual art, Ulises Carrión (1941, San Andrés Tuxtla, Mexico – 1989, Amsterdam) was an artist, editor, curator, and theorist of the post-1960s international artistic avant-garde.

The exhibition is composed of nearly 350 pieces that include books, magazines, videos, films, sound pieces, mail art, public projects, and performances, along with Carrión’s initiatives as curator, editor, distributor, lecturer, archivist, art theorist, and writer. It is a significant body of original work structured so as to place a spotlight on every facet of his production.

Alexandre Estrela (Lisbon, 1971) uses film and video as the core mediums in his artistic practice, which questions the materiality of the image, dialoguing with a history of experimental film, video and photography, which finds some of its symbolic evidence in the films of Marcel Duchamp, in photographs by Man Ray or cut-up narratives from Burroughs, for example.

The work of Juan Giralt (Madrid, 1940–2007) was initially self-taught in the Informalism that predominated the 1950s. A brief spell in Holland at the end of this decade enabled him to come into contact with the CoBrA group and saw him begin to shape a more personal and permeable pictorial language in a new interpretation of Figuration. This characterised his work in the 1970s and 1980s, turning him into a reference point of New Figuration in Madrid. In the years that followed, until his death in 2007, he would gradually incorporate abstraction, but without ever relinquishing figurative elements that were present in the constant use of collage and the painted word.

Andrzej Wróblewski (1927–1957) is, despite his short life, one of the most important Polish artists of the 20 th century. This exhibition, the first retrospective held outside his country, enables his work to be contemplated in a way that goes beyond the reductionist clichés of socialist realism or Outsider Art, through which art from countries in the Soviet sphere of influence has been studied until recently. Wróblewski was an artist that could work on the borders between abstraction and figuration, combining formal invention with the analysis of daily life and its limits – the degradation of war and dictatorial politics – by means of a profound human and political commitment.

In the work of visual artist Hito Steyerl (Munich, 1966) constructed texts and edited images enlarge the conditions of film essays, reflecting on and intervening in the systems that circulate information, and in those that present and represent the artwork. Her texts, lectures, films and audiovisual installations merge the philosophical and political reflection of critical activism inserted in the world of production and the circulation of the image and the word. Through this perspective the artist develops a critical body of work on modes of perception, control, surveillance, in addition to militarisation, migration, feminism and the political image – questions she feels have the capacity to create realities.

The Museo presents an exhibition devoted to the recent work of Ignasi Aballí, on a journey articulated around the Catalan artist’s aesthetic ideas, offering a conceptual reflection on the representation and perception of the artwork through mediums such as photographs, videos, installations, sculptures, paintings and collages, and an eclectic display of unconventional materials such as leaves, dust, rust, metals, newspaper cuttings and scraps of bank notes, which explore presence and absence, the material and immaterial, the visible and the invisible, transparency and opaqueness, appropriation and creation to relate the overabundance of images in modern-day society to the lack of meaning we can assign to them.

Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys (Amsterdam, 1920 – Utrecht, 2005), a key figure in Situationism and one of the founding members of the CoBrA group, developed his project New Babylon between 1956 and 1974. Through the project, regarded as the last great utopia in European art, the artist aimed to generate and mould a new urban environment to enable a “total fulfilment of life”. Everything sets out from the premise that, in a not-so-distant future, the growing automation of work driving technological progress would allow citizens to fully devote their time to meeting their leisure urges and thoroughly develop their creative potential.

Danh Vō’s (Bà Ria, Vietnam, 1975) art work subverts and plays with classic appropriation and opportunistic strategies of Western art in its approach to other cultures. His installations, sculptures, photographs and works on paper, particularly his early work, often calls on his origins and experiences, interspersing them with cultural, social, and historical references. Danh Vō utilises 19th-century industrial exhibition typology to portray the unique architecture in the Palacio de Cristal, encapsulating the nostalgia of a nineteenth-century palaeontology and archaeology museum inside a large display cabinet.