Madrid,
As every Friday of Arcomadrid celebration for several years, the Reina Sofía Museum has announced its acquisitions at the fair, with its own funds (in this case, just under 100,000 euros) and with the contributions of the Ministry of Culture (almost 400,000). On this occasion, three quarters of the purchases correspond to works by women artists and have mostly been made to Spanish galleries: these are twenty -six pieces of nineteen authors that the MNCARS adds to its collections for 498,000 euros, about 50,000 less than in 2024.
It has tried to cover unpublished or unpublished areas in these funds, such as the value of a series of drawings by Victorina Durán, a key artist in the generation of 27 and exile, linked to surrealism in its beginnings. They join the Queen Sofia half a dozen compositions on the role of the thirties, of delicate and evocative strokes of an atmosphere of intimacy, of the world of ballet, which she met in her childhood, and of a veiled lesbian eroticism.
The second wave of feminism has its representation in these purchases in two drawings of Maribel Nazco, which will be framed in the sculptural set of this Canarian author that the museum already owns. Establishing dialogues between painting and metal, mechanical and organic, its pieces merge the human body with the machine and the landscape. Those drawings correspond to the series Bodiesin which the line that delimits light and shadow seems to be assembled in the same way as its metal work, and eroticism is very present again, although not directly.
The Velázquez Argentina Minujín Award also participates in feminist essentialism with its series Frozen sexin which he worked after entering porn cinemas, cabarés, sex shops and festivities in New York and San Francisco, in the early seventies. These are serigraphs that combine pop aesthetics with details linked to the imaginary of desire and sex. Soon, the MNCARS will give you a monograph.
Share Minujín generation with Judy Chicago, who enters Queen Sofia’s collections with a relevant video in the international feminist perfomance: Women and Smoke, Californiawhich documes a series of performances, organized by Chicago itself between 1971 and 1972, in which it questioned the one that considered excessive masculinization of the Land Art, especially in its early stages.
As for the museum’s textile background, it will grow with an important piece by the Catalan artist Josep Grau-Garriga, pioneer and teacher of the Catalan School of Fabric Art Production, usually feminized by the history of art. The acquired work is called Colors of Secà (1974) and carried it in its maturity stage, when it investigated the subject of the fibers and the possibility of traveling from a flat concept of the warp and the plot to a three -dimensional one. The variety of fibers that Grau uses refers to both artisanal work and industry, while appealing to human work, landscape and earth through its same title and its materiality, texture and color. It is the first project of this creator in Reina Sofía.
And the pioneer of American minimalism Robert Morris is incorporated into his collections a series of graphic art of 1969, in which this author conceives the landscape as a construct between traditional nature and culture. We talk about a dozen lithographs published by the friends of Detroit Institute of Art in 1969 and that represents an important document of the Earth art; They refer to many other unrealizable projects in which the idea that art could not only be contemplated, but also traveled.
The conceptual reaction to the triumph of the painting of the eighties in the following decade has an important example in Elena Blasco, whose production, oblivious to labels, covers sculpture, painting, photography and installation. The museum has acquired Stove-adelfa (1991), installation consisting of a portable stove and a great pot wrapped by a thick rope that almost covers them: a satirical ready-made that refers to a reactive conceptual impulse to that expressionist painting that had triumphed in Spanish art in the immediately previous years.
For the first time, the Painter Ángela de la Cruz, with a representative work of her material conception of the painting in late nineties: NOHING Under A CHAIRin which a canvas couples under the legs of a chair, approaching sculptural procedures. In addition, it incorporates a metaphor of the creative act hard: the stained paint chair, and the wrinkled canvas, discarded below; It is also a representation of the daily life of the author herself, the body that loves, hates or suffers, as she remembers.
Speaking of sculptures, Queen Sofia has also bought five from María Luisa Fernández, linked to the new Basque sculpture with Elena Mendizábal, Txomin Badiola, Juan Luis Moraza, Ángel Bados or Pello Irazu. His production from the eighties usually question the place of representation of the figure of the artist, especially women, using a language close to postminimalism, to conceptualism and the review of the Basque sculptural tradition; Also with words, double senses and allusions to nature.
The acquired pieces are part of the series Ideal artists (1990-1994), in which it started from the geometric shapes that collect the circular graphics that illustrate data referring to the public presence of the creators. He made them in oil polychrome wood, especially in black or white.
A last chapter of Queen Sofia’s acquisitions nourishes authors who work from the strict present, such as Marina Vargas, who has used the theme of the framing of the academic painting of the nineteenth century to produce a visual culture for cancer as a stigma often erased from everyday reality. Break the canon (2021) is one of its proposals based on the questioning of the western aesthetic fee and the visibility of the bodies outside the norm.
Of stained Raquel, who has worked recovering testimonies of popular misogyny at the beginning of the 20th century and is part of the sample “Especent. Popular art and aesthetic revolution, ”the MNCARS has bought the ninety postcards of its Illustrated Misoginia Archive integrated in the speech of that same exhibition; and of Laia Abril, three works inserted in the installation On Rape (about rape) (2019), in which he submerged as a result of the social impact of the case of The pack. He conceived them as conceptual portraits whose stories reveal cases of survivors of sexual aggressions in different areas: the army, the church and forced marriages.
The Afro -descendant Spanish Agnes Essanti addresses in her creations notions of identity, belonging and ancestry in the context of the African diaspora in Spain; Queen Sofia has acquired the photographic installation from it To Journeywhich takes as a starting point a wooden statuette from central Africa and preserved in the Museu Ethnològic I of Les Cultures del Mono de Barcelona. He commissioned a reproduction of it and traveled with her to Cameroon, a gesture with which he metaphorically took her out of the museum and rehearsed a non -literal restitution trip.
Mónica Plans and Mónica Mays represent, for Queen Sofia, the power of the Spanish sculpture of the new generations. Of the first, which experiences and negotiates with different materials, such as cement and construction sand, the museum is made with one of the pieces of its series Wakefulnessin which protuberances and hollows, the obverse and the reverse coexist; of the second, that explores the agency and economic history of various objects, often found, from historical parameters, and they pray to before images …, Knowing not What Gods or Heroes arework around desire, paradise and extractivism.
By Carlos Rodriguez-Méndez acquires Queen Sofía Validity regionconceptual representation of the duel towards his father; And by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, one of the young artists who has worked the most from nature, a sculpture of the series Systemic grilles: A glass panel built with transparent and slightly distorted glass sections that are fixed to an underlying safety glass sheet to create a geometric pattern. It is subject to a concrete base, which recalls the museum architecture designed by Lina Bo Bardi for the São Paulo Museum of Art in 1957.
Finally, the Museum’s Latin American art funds are completed with Colombian Luzizu, with a means of means that indicate an unprecedented form of occupation of the collective space; and Juan Pablo Echeverri, with the pioneer reflection on self -representation in his obsessive daily photomatons (Miss photojapon).
