Multimedia

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.

In this video the artist Chris Killip explains his work in the field of photography and talks about his artistic influences. An essential figure in documentary photography, Killip’s work reflects the fascination and respect he feels for ordinary life and people, finding a form of expression that underscores the social and cultural peculiarities that characterised the period.
The exhibition contains a selection of over a hundred images taken between 1968 and 2004.

In this video Manuel Borja-Villel, the director of the Museum, explains the works created by Gabriel Acevedo Velarde, Maria Loboda, Alejandra Riera and Manuel Saiz specifically for the Fisuras program.

The project Paranormal Citizen, by Gabriel Acevedo Velarde, makes use of televised stories about paranormal experiences to analyse and create narratives about the intermediate space between institutions and individual subjectivity. Maria Loboda, in The Beasts, engages in a kind of contemporary archaeology that starts with the recontextualization of objects containing various strata of meaning, in such a way that what is shown - even though it is inscribed in a place of safety such as a museum - has a potentially threatening dimension. Poétique(s) de l’inachèvement [Poetics of incompleteness] initiated by Alejandra Riera is the title chosen by the artist for a project that lingers in certain experiences so dense that film cannot take them in, although it does accompany them. Finally, One True Art - 16 Responses to the Question What Art is, by Manuel Saiz, is a performative artistic experiment the aim of which is to formulate a definition of art or to reflect on the reasons that such a definition is impossible.

In this video, the curator of the exhibition João Fernandes and the artist Roman Ondák explain this work generated specifically for the Palacio de Cristal (Parque del Retiro), characterized by its questioning of the work of art in relation to the conventions generated by the place and space in which it appears

All of the poetic suggestions and all of the plastic possibilities presents Dalí as an omnivorous and visionary artist who used himself as an object of study, and whose actions in the public sphere, whether they were calculated or improvised, made him an essential figure in the sphere of contemporary representation. The exhibition focuses primarily on his surrealist period. Special attention is devoted to his paranoid-critical method, which he developed as a mechanism for the transformation and subversion of reality, allowing the final interpretation of a work to depend totally on the viewer.

The curators of this exhibition, Julia Robinson and Christian Xatrec, explain in this video some of the keys to understand why 1961 was a decisive year that led to the invention of the “expansion of the arts”. The exhibition looks at the origins of the change, the experimental activity and the earliest collective actions that pointed to the beginning of an unprecedented expansion of the notion of “composition” and soon generated a multidisciplinary project that took place in real time/simultaneously over the course of that year.

The curator of the Cildo Meireles exhibition, João Fernandes, along with the artist himself, discuss the relationship between this artist's work and the spectator's sensorial experience, the critical use of ideological and economic circulation systems, and the ethical connection with the world. The exhibition comprises works and installations being presented for the first time and also others that are among the artist's lesser known creations.

Montse Aguer, one of the exhibition's curators, takes viewers on a tour of the Salvador Dalí show, putting forward a new vision of the artist as a thinker, writer and creator of a very particular vision of the world. The exhibition comprises approximately two hundred works and is organised into eleven sections that follow something of a chronological order. The works on display date from the early years of his career up through his religious and mystical phases, his period of experimentation with scenography and also the end of his career, which was closely linked to science and technology.

In this video the artist Azucena Vieites explains the process she carries out in her work of appropriation and iconographic resignification of materials and references linked to the contemporary cultural imaginary, using drawing and collage as her main work tools. 
Also, preceding Vieites' exhibition at Museo Reina Sofía a children's workshop called Coloring Book took place, in which a group of children modified, by coloring them in, some of her drawings.

Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection and curator of the exhibition Concrete Invention, provides an explanation of this show about the development of concrete abstraction in Latin America from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Revolving around 4 countries –Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Venezuela– and five guiding concepts– Geometry, Dialogue, Ilusion, Universalism and Vibracion– the exhibition includes works such as “Book of Creation” by Lygia Pape or “Physichromie500” by Carlos Cruz-Díez, as well as some conceptual pieces like the iconic “Fio” by Cildo Meireles.

The artist Mitsuo Miura in Imagined memories, his intervention in Palacio de Cristal, he delves into two of the aesthetic themes that give expression to his artistic vocabulary: geometric shapes and pure colours. For this building, one of Museo Reina Sofía's two secondary sites in Parque del Retiro, his proposal begins on the pictorial level and extends to the spatial level, through circles of colours distributed on the floor and suspended from the ceiling.

Joshua Chuang, the curator of the exhibition, leads viewers through this collection of photographs by Robert Adams. With a photographic style that is austere and direct yet also full of nuance and expressive potential, Robert Adams (Orange, New Jersey, 1937) has been widely regarded as one of the most lucid chroniclers of the profound changes taking place in the landscape of the American West in recent decades.
The Place We Live, the first retrospective on Robert Adams to be held in Spain, takes a look at the main projects undertaken by this photographer

Nacho Criado (Mengíbar, Jaén, 1943 – Madrid, 2010) is considered one of the most important figures in the last 40 years of experimental art in Spain. The Palacio de Velázquez, one of the Museum's venues in Parque del Retiro, offers a retrospective of his work, providing insight into the multitude of media, practices and homages present in his art, and also their material realization. The Palacio de Cristal, the other Reina Sofía venue in the park and the second site of the retrospective, reconstructs the 1991 exhibition Piezas de agua y cristal, where cultivated mushrooms exemplify the 'collaborating agents' that give this exhibition its name.

Conversation with Lynne Cooke, the exhibition curator, and the artist Sharon Hayes (Baltimore, Maryland, 1970). Using methodological and conceptual strategies drawn from various spheres of discourse, Hayes' projects explore the relations between history, politics and language, using performances, videos and installations to create a collective imaginary. These processes of documenting a historical event end up conditioning the gaze of the individual, leading to a critical reflection about the frictions generated between the public and the private.