Collection. Contemporary Art: 1975–Present

The new presentation of the Museo Reina Sofía Collections stretches across the entire fourth floor of the Sabatini Building to recount the art history of Spain over the past fifty years by way of 403 works by 224 artists. This new narrative, which seeks to underscore the contribution of Spanish contemporary art, takes us back to the turbulent 1970s, a period through which we can understand the present as a collective construction: democratic space forged from the early days of Spain’s Transition to democracy to the present day.

Collection. Contemporary Art: 1975–Present unfolds across twenty-one chapters, encompassing the display of well-known pieces from the Reina’s Collections, as well as recent acquisitions and contemporary works by young emerging artists, with the stress also placed on how Spain’s artistic landscape was reflected in different social and institutional transformations in the final years of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. The exhibition of these works is structured around three exhibition routes which return, on numerous occasions, to the 1970s and with geographical spaces that are not a closed context but rather an intersection and a place of circulation for cultural manifestations. The three routes put forward an affective history — an emotional reading — of these fifty years, a revision of sculpture and the material culture of contemporary art, and a narrative of gradual institutionalisation, recounting, for the first time, the history of the Museo as part of its holdings. The Reina’s intention is to disseminate these narratives as possibilities and frameworks for future presentations, thereby making the Collections continually open to revision.

Is the past the path that leads to the present, or does its memory offer mistakes  and paths of no return when faced with a future still to build? Or better yet, how does one travel back to the past from the present? The work of a national museum is not to reinterpret the past in search of a mirror for todays society, but rather to let the concerns of the present find a multitude of responses in the past so as to understand that the present day is not something to be taken as a given, but rather as a becoming that is indispensably constructed as a collective. In uncertain times, it is not a question of imagining futures, but of trying to recognize in the present those desirable futures that are already here.

For more information, contact: Press Office of the Museo Reina Sofía, T +34 91 774 10 05 / T +34 91 774 10 11 / prensa@museoreinasofia.es
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