Multimedia

Hanne Darboven is an artist that has delved into the languages of conceptual art and minimal art, which have opened new formal possibilities for expression in the second half of the century. Her numerical series and series of drawings have filled the rooms of many exhibitions and many museums, but her serialism is very different from the one found in the work of other minimalist artists who have also used numerical progressions, such as Sol LeWitt. In this exhibition we are going to find a set of series related to Darboven's everyday life, at home and at work.

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.

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