Abstract art with a gender perspective by Irma Álvarez-Laviada stars in the ‘Kora’ cycle at the Thyssen

The artist Irma Álvarez-Laviada She is the protagonist of the ninth installment of the ‘Kora’ program hosted by the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum with her abstract art with a gender perspective.

“The tradition of abstraction has sometimes been considered a stronghold of male hegemony.”. It is not necessary to remember to what extent expressionist abstraction, the abstract expressionist movement, was linked – even if there were great women artists – to a macho rhetoric, a rhetoric of masculine affirmation. But Even formal abstraction, although it was more inclusive in this, was considered a privilege of the mind, of the genre of masculinity.“explained the director of the art gallery, Guillermo Solana, during the presentation of the exhibition.

‘In and out of the frame’which will be at the Thyssen until next May 3, is part of ‘Kora’ – which celebrates women artists – and is made up of a selection of more than thirty pieces that the Asturian has made in the last decade, along with paintings from the museum’s collection.

The curator of the exhibition, Rocío de la Villa, has celebrated the “focus” that the Thyssen places on art with a gender perspective and has recalled that although the feminist movement has claimed art made by women since the seventies with exhibitions and publications, there has been a “tendency” to forget the artists who dedicated themselves to abstraction, whether they were declared feminists or not.

Álvarez-Laviada’s works are situated in an intermediate space, inside and outside the frame, created from industrial materials intended for practical uses.

“Cardboards, pallet wood frames, MDF sheets, plastic foams… These materials are originally intended for an auxiliary function. They are humble materials, which are hidden, which do not appear in the foreground. There may be an allegorical relationship with these auxiliary materials – which are essential but remain hidden – and the own condition of creative women under patriarchy“, Solana reflected.

The artist’s work approaches geometric abstraction from a gender perspective. The attributes of the stereotypes of the masculine and the feminine – the vertical and the horizontal, the hard and the soft, the essential and the subsidiary, the full and the empty – are questioned in works that dialogue with tradition, to “deconstruct” it in creation processes governed by repetition and its differences.

The works from the permanent collection that will dialogue with those of Álvarez-Laviada – who has joked that he wanted to “upload all of them” to use them – are ‘The Annunciation’ (c.1475), by Gentile Bellini; ‘Suprematism’ by Nikolai Suetin and ‘The Pond in the Forest’ by Edgar Degas.

The exhibition tour begins with pieces that combine yellow, red and blue with black, the result of mixing the three primary colors. The artist addresses the tradition of research on these colors, from Suprematism and Neoplasticism to the studies of Joseph Albers, whose work ‘Casa Blanca B’ (1947-1954) is exhibited in this section. The piece ‘And I around’ (2025), located in the center, invites you to “travel” the space and appeals to “personal experience.”