Artistas jóvenes en los fondos del Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

6 december, 1995 - 31 january, 1996 /
Wifredo Lam Center, La Habana, Cuba
Concha García. Cedazos, 1992. Sculpture. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Collection
Concha García. Cedazos, 1992. Sculpture. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía Collection

This exhibition is a selection of works recently included in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía collection and has been organised especially for their exhibition at the Wifredo Lam Center in Havana. The work of young artists who represent a range of techniques and disciplines that are current trends on the Spanish art scene have been chosen for the occasion. The selected artists assume in all cases a high degree of experimentation and innovation applied to different media present in the exhibition: painting, sculpture, installation and photography.

The Museo Reina Sofía has included in its programme of continuous exhibitions examples of the artistic richness of Latin American production. The retrospective dedicated to the work of Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, as well as the exhibition Arte en Iberoamérica 1820-1980 are evidence of the Museum’s interest to bring countries that have a shared heritage closer together. In 1992 an exhibition dedicated to the work of Wifredo Lam was held, an artist who is an emblem of Cuban avant-garde and whose name is shared with the art centre hosting this exhibition.

A total of eighteen works by fifteen artists have been brought together as evidence of the more recent evolution in Spanish production. Included in the artistic discipline is the piece by Patricio Cabrera, a polyptych from 1994 and done in acrylic on canvas that shows four views of a landscape and in which the line commands. The diptych Diagramas lógicos (1995) by Manuel Sáiz is two versions of a figure drawn on large papers in different degrees of coding. Meanwhile, Xisco Mensua exhibited his work Inventario (1994), consisting of sixteen pieces depicting various everyday objects individually addressed as inert repertoire.

The phone cable and camouflage fabric are the materials that have been selected by Federico Guzmán for the production of Islario (1990). Another unusual material is the polyester resin used by Javier Baldeón in his piece Ceci n'est pas (1990). This same artist presents one of the photographs at the exhibition Lavandera (1994), together with the one presented by Xoan Anleo in the Fabuloso series from 1994.

Furthermore, Luis Contreras appropriates images from film and media, in an untitled work from 1995 which consists of a scene about the eroticism of firearms and fetish professions. A collection of objects arranged individually, as in Xisco Mensua’s Inventario, are the protagonists of the twenty-two photographs by Juan Francisco Isidro alluding to a possible narrative relation in the 1991 piece present at the exhibition.

Linguistic games and humorous winks are often part of the work by Rogelio López Cuenca. In addition to exposing the canvas Verité (1993) López Cuenca's work is represented in this exhibition by the photography Maybe (1992), so called in reference to the text that can be read on it: “Maybe the real you is blonde". Meanwhile, Perejaume performs an intervention in nature with the inclusion of a mirror card dispenser in his piece Postaler 2 (1984).

Installations and sculptures in this exhibition range from the allusion to the performative -as in the case of Carrying XI (1992) by Pepe Espaliú- to Concha Garcia’s rounded forms, Cedazos (1992), through to experimentation with materials uncommon in the discipline of sculpture as in the case of the works Sombra iluminada (1994) by Julio Jara, Barro con alma (1994-95) by Mercedes Laguens or Le semeur éternel (1994) by José Ramón Lidó Rico.

Exhibition´s details

Organized by: 
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in collaboration with the Dirección General de Cooperación Cultural del Ministerio de Cultura and the Embajada de España en Cuba
Curatorship: 
José Guirao
Artists:
Concha García, Federico Guzmán, Javier Baldeón, José Ramón Lidó Rico, Juan Francisco Isidro, Julio Jara, Luis Contreras, Manuel Saiz, Mercedes Laguens, Patricio Cabrera, Pepe Espaliú, Perejaume, Rogelio López Cuenca, Xisco Mensua, Xoan Anleo View more