The Reina Sofía Museum renews its permanent collection

Madrid. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presented the expansion of its permanent collection, in which it seeks to explain the evolution of contemporary art from 1975 to the present day, always from a local vision, in which it talks about issues that have shaken the country in recent decades, such as the transition to democracy after the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, the implosion of heroin in the main urban centers, the proliferation of new sexualities, the drama of AIDS and the germination of the new feminist narrative.

The director of the art gallery, Manuel Segade, who has been in office for three years, thus presents his first major contribution, with which he leaves his particular stamp and which includes Latin American artists, such as the Colombian Beatriz González or the Cuban Ana Mendieta.

On the fourth floor of the Madrid museum, over more than 3 thousand square meters, the new museum narrative was woven, in which the piece is intended to explain the event and not an attached document or an instruction manual.

The canon is also avoided in order to question it, it seeks to be more didactic and less hermetic, but always with an eye toward offering a reading of the immediate past and, above all, the present, even the future.

Hence, throughout the exhibition we talk about everything in diverse formats, from painting, to video art, installation, photography, film, sculpture, drawings, comics and performance.

Segade explained during the presentation press conference that “the task of the museum is not to reread the past looking for a mirror for today’s society, but to allow the concerns of the present to find in it a multitude of answers that allow us to understand that today is not something given, but rather a becoming of necessarily collective construction. In uncertain times like the current ones, it is not about imagining futures, but about trying to recognize in the present those desirable futures that were already here.”

In this critical rereading of the collection, the Mexican Amanda de la Garza, deputy artistic director of the museum, had a relevant role, which is why she explained in a meeting with the media that “it is an open and long-term project, which arises from the idea that the curatorship is based on a discourse of space.” The Minister of Culture of the Spanish government, Ernesto Urtasun, also attended the presentation before the press, who described the expansion as a “cultural event of the first magnitude.”

In total, 403 works by 224 artists or groups are exhibited; Of the pieces, 258 are unpublished. Of the creators, 77 percent are Spanish, among whom those from Madrid, the Basque Country, Catalonia and Galicia stand out, while the remaining 23 percent are of other nationalities, a good part of the United States and 16 percent of Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala and Cuba.

One of the main concerns of the new managers of the venue was to make visible the art made by women, historically marginalized, hence, of the individual works, 65 percent are by men and 35 by women. In the entire collection, female artists still make up less than 15 percent.

Miró, Fontcuberta, Ocaña…

The expansion of the permanent collection consists of an introduction and three itineraries; It is part of the transition to democracy in Spain, a turbulent period that conditioned everything in society, including, of course, art. It began with a series of unpublished engravings by Pablo Picasso that were burned in an attack by extreme right groups in 1971, in the Theo gallery, where the terrorists wrote that “if another July 18, 1936 (date of the beginning of the civil war) is necessary, we are willing to do so.” These engravings look directly at an important visual document of those years, a short film by Iván Zulueta in which he recorded the mythical Gran Vía street in Madrid on the day Franco’s death was announced.

From this introduction, the itineraries begin, which are not chronological but thematic, in which feminism, lesbianism, sexual practices such as cruising (spontaneous encounters to have sex), the rise of AIDS at the end of the 20th century, the proliferation of heroin addiction after the arrival of freedom to the country, the first gay and transsexual pride marches, the September 11 attacks in the United States and its impact on the world, and even the shrouds of Beatriz González in the piece titled In retrospect (2022), which refers to the Peace Agreement reached between the FARC guerrilla and the Colombian State.

On the tour there is also a part for the history of the Reina Sofía and a very brief section on the culture of African or black origin, historically ignored in the country.

Among the artists present are Miquel Barceló, Miró, Dalí, Juan Genovés, Juan Muñoz, Cristina Iglesias, Susana Solano, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Esther Ferrer, Cristina García Rodero, Richard Serra, Andy Warhol, Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Ocaña, Ouka Leele, Ceesepe, Nazario, Iván Zulueta, Alberto García-Alix, Judy Chicago, Barbara Hammer, Eulàlia Grau, David Wojnarowicz, Pilar Albarracín or Cabello/Carceller, Joan Fontcuberta, Dora García, Pocho Guimaraes, Agnes Essonti and Rubén H. Bermúdez.

The new permanent collection will open to the public tomorrow. The objective of those responsible for the museum is to carry out a second presentation in 2027, on the third floor, with works from the period between the 50s and 70s, and another in 2028, which will culminate this “rereading” of the collection with the presentation of a second floor dedicated to the avant-garde.