Segade claims Guernica as the founding basis of Reina Sofía and defends that “it does not move”

The director of the Reina Sofía Museum, Manuel Segade, recalled this Wednesday that the origin of this art gallery is based on the return of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica to Spain and has assured that the painting will remain there.

“Guernica is not moving, as you know,” Segade launched during a conference at the Reina Sofía in which he explained the result of the first phase of the project to reorganize and improve the spaces, aimed at facilitating public access to the Museum’s collections.

Throughout her exhibition, Segade has shown the influence of political changes, the transition towards democracy, feminism and new social identities on contemporary art. Thus, he has been reviewing the main works on display and the itineraries proposed by the museum itself to explore them.

At that point, he has shown the engravings of Pablo Picasso that were vandalized in the 70s with acid and knives by the guerrillas of Cristo Rey, who considered the artist as a “Marxist, communist, unpatriotic, pimp, homosexual, pornographer and illegitimate son.”

“I think it is not necessary to insist, but I remind you that this museum exists because Guernica, the last exile, came back to Spain,” said Segade, who in turn defended that “without democracy, what we have are broken Picassos; with democracy, what we have are museums where society’s right to access these works can be guaranteed.”

The director has also taken the opportunity to talk to the public, to whom he has given some glimpses of the next phases of this reorganization, planned for the years 2027 and 2028.

After highlighting that Guernica is in “the largest room” of the museum, the director has argued that “the most past past” must be done on its floor – the second – “yes or yes” in order to address the chronological story in art. Thus, he has indicated that there will be spaces dedicated to art from the 50s to the 70s, and a Latin American wing.

This, among other things, is what motivated the first stage of this reorganization process to begin on the top floor, where the works start from the Transition process. However, he has recognized the difficulty of working in a time that “was pure synchronicity with the present.”

“We are convinced that our language will have to have the same diversity as the art we show and we will do so in the future transformations of the third and second floors of Sabatini,” he concluded.

Last February, the Reina Sofía National Museum presented the new arrangement of its permanent collection located on the fourth floor of the Sabatini building, a route of more than 3,000 square meters that proposes a review of contemporary art in Spain from the Transition to the present and that has a significant presence of works by women as well as pieces by Latin American artists.

Segade then explained that this would be the first of three major interventions that will completely reorganize the collections on the upper floors of the building. All this with the aim of “answering the question of how to reach the past from the present.”