Nouvel Building, Rooftop Terrace

In the late 1960s, minimalism endowed sculpture with a new formal repertoire based on elemental geometric forms, giving rise, moreover, to a new way of understanding the relationship between artwork and spectator. Contemporary sculpture is phenomenological, conceived as an instrument to interpret the space it occupies and requiring the moving perception of visitors’ bodies to be able to work.

Within the Museo Reina Sofía Collection are significant geometric sculptures from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, their rational forms becoming an elemental language in cities’ public spaces, the signs of a new economy in which culture shared a new value system. The development of contemporary urbanism was coupled with this aesthetic of technological utopia and absolute confidence in the future, an affirmative condition of sculpture which would make it an emblem of economic capital that sought representation through the vertical growth of corporate buildings and the seductive sheen of glazed mirrors as curtain walls. At the same time, however, it materialised into a stereotype that has obstructed the view of the major contributions of this generation of sculptors. In addition to the utopia of an international taste that had already been a dream of the avant-garde was a changing demand for greater collective participation in public space. These sculptors are, therefore, examples of this force of transformation.