Madrid,
When, in 1986, the Reina Sofía Art Center took its first steps under that denomination, Marisa González was part of the extensive group of Spanish artists who curated one of their inaugural exhibitions: “Processes: culture and new technologies.”
Pioneer in the use of tools and technological supports for creative purposes from a very early stage of her career, it is now when this Bilbao author, which in 2023 received the Velázquez award, returns to this center to finally present an anthological sample that gives an account of her constant explorations with the photocopiers, the video, the photograph and the computer for five decades and that has been cocked by Violeta Janeiro.
The retrospective is entitled “a way of making generative”, because its assembly affects that González earned very soon of such devices (thermofoxes, color photocopiers and other machines that at the time were pointer technology, but also the very home Essay – Error, to the finding even among ruin and immediacy.
It is approximately twenty series and projects that have arrived at Queen Sofia, giving a circumstance that tells us about the difficulties of authors such as Marisa to make your way in institutional and private collecting: most of the pieces present here come from their study – confessed González does not throw anything – and, in some specific case, family funds and MNCARS himself. The programming of this exhibition responds in fact, in the words today of Manuel Segade, to the desire of the museum to expose the creations of this multiple architect as soon as possible, which has always been an active part of the artistic ecosystem, but even recent dates from the background. Even from the continuous collaboration: committed at the time against the dictatorship, and something later with the causes of feminism and with the workers with less rights, from the seventies it is part of a large number of associations, such as the professional of artists of Madrid or women in the visual arts.
The tour of this exhibition, which will later travel to Azkuna Zentroa, starts examining her early attention for materials and roads away from which she could know when she studied Fine Arts and by the by -products derived from the use of different technologies, of the thermosensitive papers and printing tests to the colorful waste of the filter of a dryer. Self -portraits and silhouettes were already among their most frequent reasons, the last as a symbolic footprint that we all have, also those always relegated to anonymity and the disinherited.
It would be vital in Marisa González’s trajectory in the United States: in the Art Institute of Chicago, the master’s degree was called Generative systems: art, science and technologywhere she met Professor Sonia Sheridan, who collaborated with her. Since then I would study the processing of images on multiple occasions to achieve different visual effects, textures and tones, that is, potentially infinite possibilities of variations, overlaps and fragments.
His first color photocopier, then precious jewel, was a 3m color-in-color And its use allowed the artist to analyze the many options of distortion and anomaly, with inevitable echoes beyond the strictly creative in uniformity contexts. Their own files tend to that distortion, rather than the strict classification: they nourish recycled and recycled materials, useless appearance objects to which she gives alternative senses, from guatas to doll members.
After forming in Chicago, González returned to Spain to, then return to the United States: in the Corcoran School in Washington, and along with Mary Beth Edelson, he entered the fields of feminism also in the artistic. From then on they date their series Maternitythat carried out being pregnant and that refers to the religious, legal and health implications of that condition; The downloadthat collects the gestures of their companions to know the torture inflicted to women prey in the Pinochet dictatorship; either Lizz Williams and his masksaround the racial identity or absence of it from a mulatto partner.
Later, another photocopier came to change many things: the Bubble color jet 145which allowed him to use a larger paper format, similar to DIN A4. He reviewed previous materials, such as the series Identity vertigoabout the vital stages of women, or The violationa complaint of female reification from a casually found doll. Her own file was for her reinterpretation source.
When at the end of the seventies or in the eighties the painting took new brios, Marisa González divered in her linking her with her musical interests (she had made the piano career at the Bilbao Conservatory). To the usual supports of that medium incorporated photocopies of processed scores, in series such as Musical spellingswith the collaboration of Llorenç Barber and Javier Darias; In these works, rhythm and cadence arise from the movement of paper and light gradations.
If the pentagrams were the starting point of those projects, that fluff of the dryer, of which it was down for its tones and its lightness, would be the origin of the series Presencesin which the light also had a lot to say. They could be seen at the time in Evelyn Bottle.
The heart of the exhibition is a set of works, some still in process, in which he investigated the ties between the only and the multiple and between what he lives and the inert. One of its fundamental tools in that purpose was the computer system Luma, and even with the waste of his obsolescence he has been able to function. In Transgenicin addition to referring to the ethical and health derivatives of these products, against artificiality and desire, and in the portraits LUMENA He exercised the complex distortion on his models, companions linked to the artistic sphere such as Soledad Lorenzo, Lola Dopico, Pedro Garhel or Menene Gras, among many.
Queen Sofia have also arrived the installation Fax stationelaborated together with her students of the current art workshops -their contents could contribute-; His images dedicated to the community life of the very qualified households of the Philippines in Hong Kong; and its projects focused on two past Basque infrastructure already without a useful life: the nuclear of Lemoniz (inaugurated the non -small path of artists who have worked around their empty facilities) and the bakery of Bilbao, which exceeded the thousand employees until closing in the late nineties. In the installation dedicated to the latter, original lamps of that place illuminate communications of those who first directed the company, blaming productivity declines to the demand for annual vacations.
“Marisa González. A way to make generative”
National Museum of Art Center Reina Sofía. MNCARS
C/ Santa Isabel, 52
Madrid
From May 21 to September 22, 2025
