Pieza Única. 
Manolo Millares, Personaje caído I

• Single Piece is a room devoted to the temporary exhibition of one sole work from the Museo Reina Sofía Collections.
• In this instance, in conjunction with the birth of Manolo Millares (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1926 – Madrid, 1972), Single Piece shines a spotlight on Personaje caído I (Fallen Figure I). 

In its Collections, the Museo Reina Sofía conserves thirty works by Millares, one of the prominent representatives of Informalism and a key figure in Spanish painting in the second half of the twentieth century, his work encompassing graphic art, drawings and paintings.

Personaje caído I was made just two years prior to his untimely death, at the age of forty-six, during a time that witnessed his rise to international prominence. The picture folds into a crumpled volume, like the seams of a bandaged wound or the suspended body of a homunculus tangled in its burial cloth. The fabric is an agonised protest, almost under the shadow of a crucifixion; a dislocated painting with the tautness of a shroud stretched across a calm red horizon with a tone of dried blood.  From this violence, white emerges at once as grief and as hope. “I believe my art slaps death to justify life”, Millares wrote. 

Film Series

From 17 to 19 December 

In the anniversary year of Millares’s birth, the Museo also puts forward an unseen gaze on the artist which allows his work in film to be rediscovered with new considerations on historical memory and performative practice. 

Millares would make three films in 16mm and Super 8 and would feature as an actor in another film shot by collector Alberto Portera. From 17 to 19 December, his films Millares 1970 (1970), where he connects his hessian works with the mass graves of the Spanish Civil War; Eros Taro (1969), which travels across the lunar landscape of Lanzarote and through the houses of César Manrique as a refuge amid the bleakness of Francoism; and Diciembre 68 enero (December ’68 January, 1968), a film shot in Super 8 which reveals a fascination with the culture of death in Iberian archaeology and offers new readings on his work, will all be screened. 

These films will be digitised, in 4K, by the Museo and shown for the first time in higher quality. They will also be offset by other films Millares commented upon and considered influences, for instance To Die in Madrid, by Frédéric Rossif, and Red Desert, by Michelangelo Antonioni.