Marisa González

This anthological exhibition on Marisa González (Bilbao, 1943) surveys the artist’s career after she was awarded the Velázquez Prize in 2023.

A series of works from the 1970s, made in the Department of Generative Systems from the School of the Art Institute de Chicago, foretells of the artist’s early and sustained interest in communication and image reproduction technology, a concern what would situate González at the forefront of such experimentation in Spain. Some years later, she would in fact participate in Procesos (Processes), a 1986 exhibition that opened the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and explored the intersections between culture and new technology. Moreover, the subject matter explored in some of her earlier works (images related to violence against women, revisions of maternity, etc.) have granted the artist a position in recent research on feminist genealogies in Spanish art.

Across her trajectory, Marisa González’s concerns have revolved around residue and waste, and in the mid-2000s she turned her attention towards a major inoperative structure, the Lemóniz nuclear power plant. In Presencias (Presence), meanwhile, a long-standing series from the early 1980s, she decontextualised a base material such as the wadding that becomes detached during the domestic drying of laundry.

At other points, González has drawn on social phenomena rarely heard in the public sphere, for instance Ellas, filipinas (Philippine Women, 2009–2010), a report on ephemeral constructions that hundreds of female domestic workers from the Philippines, displaced to Hong Kong, build for their Sunday rest in an area which is the city’s daily centre of bustle and business.

Further, the exhibition spans the constant variety of media in Marisa González’s practice, including hybridisations such as Grafías musicales (Musical Spellings, 1989–1990), which, via painting and photocopies, translate contemporary scores into visual language. She also centres her work on the task of installing some of her pieces, for instance in Ensueño. Escenas de la vida cotidiana (Daydream. Scenes of Daily Life, 1998) or the Luminarias (Luminaires) from the project La fábrica (The Factory, 2000).