Under the suggestive name of ‘Communicating Vessels, 1881-2021’, the remarkable 10-year research work offers an ambitious but disturbing perspective of stages in which culture and especially visual artists have been involved in world events.
As ‘appetizer’, perhaps as a hook, ‘Woman in Blue’, by Pablo Picasso, at the beginning of the tour in which head of the museum’s Collections area, Rosario Peiró, confessed to Prensa Latina that the painter from Malaga is one of the great protagonists.
“From art works we create stories. We have built this new collection trying to highlight some new works and making different readings of others already in display, or to reflect a panorama that corresponds to the lines of the Museum”, Peiro commented.
For his part, museum director, Manuel Borja-Villel, said that with this new presentation “it is about rethinking the way in which art is told from a place like Spain”.
We intend that the proposed reflections are linked to the ‘nowadays’, therefore, issues that concern everyone are addressed: exiles, the crisis or feminism, he said.
It is perceptible, as Borja-Villel highlighted, the essential feedback that comes from Latin American art from which some names are relevant, such as Mexican Diego Rivera, Cuban Wifredo Lam, Brazilian Hélio Oiticica, Argentine Jorge Glusberg, Colombian Fernell Franco, Venezuelan Jesús Soto and Chilean Luis Camnitzer, among others.
The anticipation of neoliberal signs in Augusto Pinochet, the harshness of the Cold War led by Ronald Reagan, tolerance and at the same time rejection of homosexuality due to AIDS, feminism and crusades against pandemics.
Of course, we could not miss emblematic works like imperishable Guernika by Picasso, and important samples of creations by Miró, Dalí, Antonio Saura, André Bretón, Luis Buñuel, Vicente Huidobro, Hans Arp or Robert Capa.
Keys to modernity seen in the museum’s Nouvel 0, entitled ‘Un barco ebrio’ (A drunken ship): eclecticism, institutionality and disobedience, and other details in spaces called Closed Field, Lost Thought and Double Exposure: Art and the Cold War.
The route is made up of a group counting on nearly two thousand works, six floors grouped together, four of the Sabatini building and two of the Nouvel extension, which adds up to an exhibition area of more than 15 thousand square meters.
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