The Reina Sofía opens a new space for temporary works

Madrid. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the largest contemporary art gallery in Spain, inaugurated a new space in its central building called Piece Única, which seeks to give visibility to some of the pieces that are stored and that are part of its collection with the purpose of displaying them temporarily. The first piece chosen for exhibition is Art Center 6 (Blow Down), by the Swiss Thomas Hirschhorn, a crucial artist of the movement called “institutional criticism”, from which creators questioned the art system and the structure of power in the 1980s, in which they put the generation of the economic value of art museums as the target of their rhetorical attacks.

The new space of the Madrid museum is located on the first floor of the central building, right at the vertex where it communicates with the so-called Sabatini and Nouvel buildings, which are the two spaces of recent construction as a result of the expansion of the space. It is just a crossroads with a large influx of people due to its strategic location, in addition to being very bright.

Hirschhorn, born in 1957 in Bern, Switzerland, is one of the most provocative and influential contemporary artists. His work is characterized by large-scale installations and sculptures made with everyday and inexpensive materials, such as cardboard, wood, adhesive tape or metal sheets. Through these pieces, he addresses political and social issues, exploring themes such as power, inequality, consumerism and mass culture.

Art Center 6 It is the sixth in a series of installations that represent a current art institution as a dollhouse.

The work, which now belongs to the Madrid museum, is the result of a recent donation from a Basque collector, Fernando Meana, who died in 2020, and his wife, María Victoria Larrucea, who throughout their lives managed to build a private collection that houses more than 500 works by prominent contemporary artists, such as Juan Muñoz, Cristina Iglesias, Cildo Meireles, Cindy Sherman and Miquel Barceló, among others.

Hirschhorn’s work has been exhibited in biennials such as Sao Paulo, Venice and Shanghai, and is housed in museums such as the Center Georges Pompidou (Paris), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), MOCA (Los Angeles), Tate Modern (London) and MoMA (New York), among others.

Among his maxims, Hirschhorn always remembers that “all art is in a critical state. Which means to criticize, but also to be criticized. It is in a state between life and death.”