The return of the snake
dal 11/11/2014 al 12/4/2015
Segnalato da
11/11/2014
The return of the snake
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid
This exhibition represents an approach to the work of Mathias Goeritz produced after he settled in Mexico in 1949. It employs the principle of "emotional architecture" as a theme. Contemporary a retrospective devoted to the work of artist Patricia Gadea, a key figure in the revival of Spanish painting in the 1980s and 1990s.
The return of the snake
Mathias Goeritz and the invention of emotional architecture
Curated by Francisco Reyes Palma
This exhibition represents an approach to the work of Mathias Goeritz (Danzig, 1915 – Mexico City, 1990), produced after he settled in Mexico in 1949. In his theoretical and practical output, spanning four decades, rational utopia and Neo-primitivism converge, factors that stem from his own biography: his journey through different cities in Europe and North Africa (1948), his stint in Spain, and his participation in the preliminaries to the Primera Semana de Arte in Santillana del Mar (September 1949), as well as his contact with Mexican culture.
The work on show employs the principle of “emotional architecture” as the theme to build upon and articulate its exhibition discourse. Formulated by Mathias Goeritz in 1954, this principle became the dynamic core and theoretical and aesthetic basis of his work, appealing to the need to envisage spaces, works and objects that cause maximum emotion in modern man, as opposed to functionalism, aestheticism and individual authorship. Thus, the notions of collaboration, freedom of creation and the recovery of the social functions of design are acknowledged in every work cultivated and produced by Goeritz during these years.
The exhibition, put together as a journey through Goeritz’s most emblematic works, highlights how the ensemble of his work and activity emanated from the acceptance of art as a meta-artistic project (encompassing the social, political and public spheres), where a primitive form – the edges of the lines that form the snake’s body (La serpiente de El Eco, 1953) – becomes a formal and conceptual unit in all of his pieces, developed within a Cold War context. Equally, terms like scale model and monument appear as categories that pass through his work, substantiating the will to subvert the notion of proportion.
To illustrate these themes and the set of problems regarding the conception and production of different projects and ideas, the exhibition comprises a selection of over two hundred works – drawings, sketches, scale models, photographs, sculptures and panel paintings – that reveal the experimental, analytical and even playful nature of Goeritz’s oeuvre, underpinned by the persistence of a theme and motif.
-----
November 5, 2014 - January 5, 2015
Patricia Gadea
Atomic-Circus
Curated by Virginia Torrente
Atomic-Circus is the first retrospective devoted to the work of artist Patricia Gadea (Madrid, 1960 – Palencia 2006), a key figure in the revival of Spanish painting in the 1980s and 1990s. Her painting emerged at a time of experimentation with freedom, sheltered by the movida cultural movement in Madrid and an atmosphere of euphoria brought about by democratic change.
With links to artists from new figurative art, her work takes on comic elements, used alongside figures from popular culture and images from display advertising, through which she reflects on her own epoch. These elements are altered in her work by using collage techniques to offer a critical vision of reality; or in the words of the artist: “I like the feeling of the moment, the risk in my real history, where complexity can actually be very simple. Speaking ironically about different languages and distorted images.”
Her spell in New York, in the second half of the 1980s, represents a turning point in her career – it was in this city that Gadea formed the collective Estrujenbank, together with the painter Juan Ugalde and the poet Dionisio Cañas. The work inside the collective gave rise to a more politicised language, particularly evident in the Circus series, which satirically spotlights the model for promoting the image of Spain at the start of the 1990s and the disenchantment the democratic process had left behind. The circus is a metaphor that sees the logos of political parties and caricatured figures from the government share poster space with clowns, a female trapeze artist and a tiger, figures that would recurrently appear in her work from that point on.
Upon moving to Palencia in 1996, the city she would reside in until her death, her work became more intimate, serene and introspective, where paper as a medium took precedence, offering an aspect of fragility heightened by the sketched aesthetic of her most oneiric imagery. A series of these drawings, previously unexhibited, are displayed for the first time in this exhibition.
Press office
Concha Iglesias (+34) 91 7741005 / 06 prensa1@museoreinasofia.es - prensa2@museoreinasofia.es
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia
Santa Isabel, 52 Floor 4, Madrid Spagna
Monday, Wednesday, Thrusday, Friday, Saturday 10:00 a.m - 9:00 p.m
Sunday 10:00 a.m - 2:30 p.m Open the whole Museum
Sunday 2:30 p.m - 7:00 p.m. Temporary exhibitions 4 euro.