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Are there continuities between Guernica and the strange, often agonized vision of humanity that Picasso had set forth over the preceding decade? How did Picasso’s distinctive set of concerns, which at moments seem dark to the point of despair, inform his final picture of women and animals in pain? Curators T.J Clark and Anne Wagner, along with Manuel Borja-Villel, director of Museo Reina Sofía, explain the key elements of the exhibition.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is interviewed a few weeks before the opening of the exhibition tributed to him at the Petit Palais of Paris. Asked for which of his works or era he would choose to survive him, Picasso avoids responding directly, pointing out that each work is the result of a moment, a circumstance and a mood. Nevertheless, he immediately mentions Guernica (1937), as an example that illustrates his answer: behind the picture, there is a war. Picasso's Guernica, like the rest of his work, can not be explained from the interpretation of the signs or from the greater or lesser success that he obtains, but each work constitutes a page of a great notebook of memories and notes, his own biography, where the personal is inseparable from the artistic.

Interview with Pablo Picasso. In: Panorama, October 21, 1966.
Office national de radiodiffusion télévision française.

Rudolf Frieling and Gary Garrels, curators of the exhibition Bruce Conner. It's All True, and Manuel Borja-Villel, Director of Museo Reina Sofía, talk about one of the most pre-eminent American artists from the second half of the twentieth century. Conner’s work emerged from the California art scene and addressed wide-ranging questions concerning American society in the post-war era: from the burgeoning consumer culture to the dread of nuclear apocalypse. In his work he cultivated alternate mediums - now the hallmarks of 21st-century art - adopting different techniques and often creating hybrid pieces midway between painting and sculpture, film and performance, drawing and printing.

Till Fellrath, co-curator of the exhibition and Manuel Borja-Villel, director of Museo Reina Sofía, introduce this first monographic show on the activity of the Art et Liberté Group, a collective of artists working out of Cairo during World War Two. The exhibition comprises a selection of around one hundred pictorial works and a range of photographic and documentary materials.
The Art et Liberté Group, founded by Georges Henein, Ramses Younan, Kamel El-Telmissany and Fouad Kamel, cultivated a vernacular artistic practice bound to Surrealism and international artistic debate.

The line is the primary formulation in the imaginary of Anne-Marie Schneider (Chauny, France, 1962), in which autobiographical activity also has a strong presence. The line refers to gestural writing and gives shape to the enigmatic world of personages whose bodies are often taken apart and fitted back together in fragments, prolonged in domestic space and projected on to the landscape.

Lothar Baumgarten concentrates here on the fragility of the domed glass structure of the Palacio de Cristal to create a sound sculpture from a series of audio recordings of ice thawing of the Hudson River in upstate New York. Within the transparent architectural presence of its glass corpus, the deafening sound of the ice becomes a tonal analogy for the crashing stocks and assets of financial markets; it concerns greedy speculation about unlimited economic growth and the resulting impact on the dramatically changing global climate.

This presentation of holdings from the Museo Reina Sofía Collection, largely made up of recent acquisitions, approaches the languages and artistic practices that defined the period between the end of the 1990s and 2007 – both in Spain and internationally - by way of a series of shared questions that heralded the start of the century and run up to the present time.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museo Reina Sofía have organised one of the most comprehensive retrospectives devoted to Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924–1976). His remarkable output in the 1960s and 1970s established him as one of the most important artists on the international scene, and one of the most influential for numerous contemporary artists from that time to the present day.

Another Family Plot is an anthological exhibit of Txomin Badiola and in its preparation it makes manifest the binomial between construction and critical deconstruction that characterizes all Badiola’s work. The artist has responded to the Reina Sofía Museum’s invitation with an exhibit that is the result of a curatorial process fruit of a process of discussion with a group of artists which has accompanied Badiola’s work throughout his career, among them Ana Laura Aláez, Ángel Bados, Jon Mikel Euba, Pello Irazu, Asier Mendizabal, Itziar Okariz and Sergio Prego.

Damián Ortega (Mexico City, 1967) started out as a newspaper cartoonist in the 1980s, approaching the political scene with acerbic wit. His artistic concerns shifted when he joined the Taller de los Viernes (Friday Workshop) in Tlalpan (active from 1987 to 1992), a self-styled school and the place where he would come into contact with a creative community that was both diverse and an alternative to the dominant reactionary muralism in Mexico at the time. It was in this milieuthat he realised his first sculptures, continuing the ironic tone from his previous profession.

The exhibition Campo Cerrado takes its name from the homonymous novel by Max Aub and looks to examine Spanish art in the complex and controversial 1940s, a decade that has received little attention and one that exists in a critical and historiographical vacuum, despite its importance in structuring modern sensibility in Spain.

The exhibition Wifredo Lam revolves around the genesis of his work, the diverse stages and conditions of reception and the progressive integration of a body of work that was painstakingly put together in Spain, Paris, Marseille and Cuba, tracing the artist’s unique career by way of almost two hundred and fifty works – paintings, drawings, etchings, prints, ceramics - and is completed with over three hundred documents – letters, photographs, magazines and books.

The work of Swiss artist Rémy Zaugg (Courgenay, 1943 – Basel, 2005), which stretches across four decades, is on display in the Palacio de Velázquez. The exhibition The Question of Perception is the outcome of a close collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía and the Museum für Gegenwartkunst, Siegen, and looks over a body of work based on the study of perception, and the relationships between text and images, colour and language, the real and the subjective, and between plane and space.