Miró and the United States @ Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona + The Phillips Collection, Washington DC - A Major Exhibition

Miró and the United States

Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

10 October 2025 – 22 February 2026

The Phillips Collection, Washington 

21 March – 5 July 2026

The Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, in collaboration with The Phillips Collection in Washington, presents a new and revealing exhibition entitled Miró and the United States, which highlights the intense, bidirectional and intergenerational relationship between Joan Miró and his contemporaries in North America. While it is well known that many North American artists were inspired by Miró, it is less well known that he was also inspired by North American art, particularly gestural, action and large format painting. This exchange and creative flow spanned continents and generations and is one of the central themes of the exhibition, which is part of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Fundació Joan Miró. Coming from a Spain devastated by the Franco dictatorship, the United States represented for Joan Miró not only art, but also a country of large open horizons, hope, democracy, future and endless possibilities.

Miró and the United States brings together an outstanding selection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, films and archival documents from American and European collections, as well as new studies by renowned specialists on Miró’s artistic evolution.

Miró and the United States is a unique exhibition because it offers a fresh look at Miró’s place in modern art, a reading that places the North American context at its heart. In other words, rather than focusing on the French context, which is essential for understanding his work from the 1920s and 1930s onwards, the show situates the United States as a pivotal territory in the evolution of Joan Miró’s artistic language, his international recognition and his connections with other artists. The United States enabled Joan Miró to undertake large-scale public projects – such as the sculpture Moon, Sun and One Star, made for Chicago – that would have been unfeasible in Spain at the time. The open and experimental environment of the United States helped Miró to consolidate his creative freedom and international recognition.

The exhibition therefore showcases key moments in Miró’s career in the USA: his two retrospectives in New York (in 1941 and 1959), his seven visits between 1947 and 1968, and also the pivotal role played by his dealer, Pierre Matisse, as well as the support of various American institutions and collectors.

The exhibition is a unique event as it displays 138 works from American and European collections as well as those from the Fundació Joan Miró’s own holdings, including both works by Joan Miró and approximately forty other artists. The selection is based on known connections and intergenerational relationships of admiration, including the likes of Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Helen Frankenthaler, Arshile Gorky, Lee Krasner, Alice Trumbull Mason, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, among many others. This artistic conversation demonstrates how Miró’s legacy continues to live on.

Based on years of research, the exhibition re-examines the established narratives about Miró’s position in the history of art through the selection of artists who feature in it. The different sections of Miró and the United States explore this relationship between Joan Miró and forty-nine contemporary artists from different generations. The exhibition also includes many artists who, despite not being originally from the country, moved or went there temporarily to develop part of their artistic careers. Driven by immigration, exile, the search for opportunities or cultural exchange, these creators played a decisive role in shaping the diverse and international North American art scene.

Although it has become commonplace, the fact that the centre of the art world shifted from Paris to New York is historically grounded. The global upheaval of the Second World War led to many European artists and intellectuals being exiled to the United States, fostering the emergence of North American Abstract Expressionism. This geopolitical and cultural shift was examined in a pioneering manner by Serge Guilbaut in How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1985), in which he argues how New York appropriated the symbolic leadership of modern art.

Joan Miró witnessed and participated in the shift of artistic capital from Paris to New York in the period immediately following the turbulent years of the Second World War. This geopolitical and cultural reconfiguration, which may have once seemed distant, now resonates with an urgency and topicality that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago. One of the major attractions of Miró and the United States is the curatorial proposal, which brings together works and artists that reveal connections between Miró and the North American art scene that have never been seen before. The exhibition also offers the public an exceptional opportunity to view works that have never previously been exhibited in Spain, including Lee Krasner’s The Seasons, which is on loan from the Whitney Museum for the first time.

Another exhibition highlight is the presence of Miró's Mural Painting, 20 March 1961 (1961), a monumental work that was exhibited several times in the 1960s: in 1961 at the Galerie Maeght in Paris and the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, and in 1964 in London and Zurich as part of the Miró retrospective organised by Roland Penrose. Since then, once Josep Lluís Sert had donated the mural to the Harvard Art Museums, this is the first time they have authorised its loan for an exhibition in Europe, a fact that makes its presence in the Miró and the United States exhibition a truly exceptional event.

Moreover, in an unprecedented move, the first two works that Joan Miró exhibited in the United States are reunited for the first time: Le Renversement (1924) and Painting (1926), which were originally presented at the Brooklyn Museum.

As part of Miró and the United States, the Fundació Joan Miró is presenting 22 pochoirs on paper of Constellations, dated 1959. Like the original Constellations of 1940-1941, they were conceived by Joan Miró so that they could be viewed from both sides. While these pieces have been previously exhibited in other settings, this is the first time they have been displayed according to this original, double-sided design, exactly as the artist had intended. This unprecedented curatorial commitment recovers his original vision, offering the public a fresh look at the formal freedom and experimental spirit that define his work.

Alongside important works admired by Joan Miró, such as Jackson Pollock's Number 14, are more surprising dialogues, such as that with Janet Sobel, whose Illusion of Solidity (1945) shows her to be the precursor of the dripping technique One of the exhibition’s crowning works is Lee Krasner’s The Seasons, a piece of imposing dimensions and sublime visual and emotional impact that is travelling to Spain for the first time. The exhibition also sheds light on female artists who had to use male pseudonyms to gain recognition, such as Henrietta Myers (Peter Miller) and Corinne Michelle West (Michael West).

The Miró and the United States exhibition arrives at a particularly opportune moment, filling a clear need in Miró’s artistic story. It transports us to another time and place – full of light, curiosity and risk – when art was a bold commitment to a better future. Amidst a 20th century marked by repression and instability, contact with the United States represented a source of creative energy and openness for Joan Miró, a democratic and dynamic horizon full of artistic opportunities. Miró actively engaged in dialogue with the North American artistic community, which became a place of inspiration and transformation. This fruitful exchange not only renewed his career, but also reinforced his ability to connect with a world in motion, full of contrasts and possibilities. The exhibition therefore invites us to look back and move forward with hope, to continue taking risks and to believe in the power of art as a tool for change and expanding horizons.

Miró and the United States

© Courtesy Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Miró and the United States, available in Catalan, Spanish and English. It includes texts by renowned Miró curators and specialists: Dawn Ades, Beatriz Cordero Martín, Marko Daniel, Matthew Gale, Patricia Juncosa, Robert Lubar Messeri, Teresa Montaner, Dolors Rodríguez Roig, Élisa Sclaunick, Elsa Smithgall and Anne Umland.

The Miró and the United States exhibition, co-organised with The Phillips Collection in Washington, will also be on show there from 21 March to 5 July 2026.

Curatorship: Marko Daniel, Matthew Gale and Dolors Rodríguez Roig from the Fundació Joan Miró, in collaboration with Elsa Smithgall from The Phillips Collection

FUNDACIO JOAN MIRO, BARCELONA

www.fmirobcn.org

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva @ Guggenheim Museum Bilbao - "Anatomy of Space" Exhibition

Maria Helena Vieira da Silva

Anatomy of Space

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

October 16, 2025 - February 22, 2026

An in-depth survey of the visual language of Portuguese-born French artist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–1992), this exhibition traces key moments in her career from the 1930s to the late 1980s through eight thematic sections. Particular focus is placed on her exploration of architectural space, where she dissolved the boundaries between real and imaginary urban landscapes, moving beyond formal references to Portuguese visual culture and avant-garde movements such as Cubism and Futurism.

The idea of space is a central theme in Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s work; her compositions, featuring labyrinthine structures, chromatic rhythms, and fragmented perspectives, capture the essence of a world in perpetual transformation. 

Born in Lisbon, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva trained both there and in Paris. Influenced by her studies in sculpture and anatomy, as well as by the great masters of the past—particularly Paul Cézanne—and the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, she developed a distinctive pictorial idiom in which the physicality of space merges with the dimensions of time and memory.

Curator: Flavia Frigeri

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO | BILBAO, SPAIN

www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus

Picasso and Klee in the Heinz Berggruen Collection @ Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

Picasso and Klee in the Heinz Berggruen Collection

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

28 October 2025 - 1 February 2026

The Museo Nacional Thyssen Bornemisza presents a selection of fifty masterpieces by Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee that belonged to the German dealer and collector Heinz Berggruen and are now part of the holdings of the Museum Berggruen in Berlin. 

In 1950 Heinz Berggruen (Berlin, 1914–Paris, 2007) opened a legendary art gallery in Paris that specialised in modern art and was frequented over the next three decades by a prestigious clientele, including his friend Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. From 1980 onwards Berggruen focused exclusively on expanding his own select holdings of twentieth-century works, assembling an outstanding collection that was later acquired by the German government in 2000. The establishment of the Museum Berggruen in the Charlottenburg district, as part of the Neue Nationalgalerie of Berlin, marked the fulfilment of the collector’s wish to not only preserve most of the collection intact for posterity but also be able to share it with the public. In a sense his case is similar to that of Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid the previous decade. 

While the building is closed for renovation, the Museum Berggruen has organised several international exhibitions since 2022 in Japan and China and, more recently, Europe to show different aspects of the collection’s highlights. The discourse of the exhibition at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is a visual and intellectual dialogue between Heinz Berggruen’s two favourite artists: Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee.

MUSEO NACIONAL THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA

Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014, Madrid

www.museothyssen.org

Warhol, Pollock and other American spaces @ Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

Warhol, Pollock and other American spaces

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

21 October 2025 - 25 January 2026

Robert Rauschenberg

Express, 1963

Oil, silkscreen ink and collage on canvas,

184.2 x 305.2 cm

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bernemisza

Audrey Flack

Abstract Expressionist Landscape (with Clouds), 1951

Oil on canvas, 74.93 x 101.6 cm

Museo FAMM, Mougins (The Levett Collection)

Photo: Fraser Marr

Cy Twombly

Detail of Pan, Bassano in Teverina, 1980

Color dry-print, 38.1 x 30.5 cm

Collection of Larry Gagosian

© Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio

Photo: Rob McKeever

Courtesy Gagosian

Andy Warhol's fascination with Jackson Pollock is well known; his obsession with having one of his works in his extensive art collection, as well as the relationship between his famous car crash series and the notorious accident that ended Pollock's life one night in August 1956.

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza is organising an exhibition which brings together the work of these two key names of 20th-century art, shown alongside that of other artists who were reconsidering issues relating to the new spatial strategies at this same time. Other artists include, among others, Audrey Flack, Robert Rauschenberg, Marisol Escobar, Cy Twombly...

Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock are two extraordinarily complex figures, seemingly very different but in fact united, like an entire generation of artists, by their interest in change in the pictorial tradition, spatial issues and a fascination with large formats. 

MUSEO NACIONAL THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA

Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014, Madrid

www.museothyssen.org

Cindy Sherman. The Women @ Hauser & Wirth Menorca

Cindy Sherman. The Women

Hauser & Wirth Menorca

23 June – 26 October 2025

Cindy Sherman

Untitled #566

2016

Dye sublimation metal print

121.9 x 128.3 cm / 48 x 50 1/2 in

© Cindy Sherman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Cindy Sherman

Untitled Film Still #6

1977

Gelatin silver print

25.4 x 20.3 cm / 10 x 8 in

© Cindy Sherman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Cindy Sherman is globally renowned for her exploration of identity and gender through the performance of meticulously observed personas for the camera. For her first solo exhibition in Spain in over two decades, ‘Cindy Sherman. The Women’ features a selection of the artist’s most iconic bodies of work, dating from the 1970s to 2010s, emphasising how Sherman revolutionized the role of the camera in artistic practice.

The exhibition includes the groundbreaking Untitled Films Stills (1977 – 1980), through which Sherman came to widespread attention as one of the ‘Pictures Generation’ artists who gained prominence in the 1970s and ‘80s responding to the age of mass media and celebrity. This pivotal series will be juxtaposed with Sherman’s large-format portrayals of film stars, starlets, society women and fashionistas from various series made over subsequent decades, addressing the layered presentation and public perception of femininity.  One of the central galleries will be dedicated to the Bus Riders and Murder Mystery series, and other early works that pre-date the Film Stills, not publicly displayed until 2000, illustrating Sherman’s detailed observations of American society and the starting point for themes and methods that were to develop throughout her career. The range of works on view offer a rare presentation of Sherman’s enduring concern with the interaction between female roles and images, and the gaze(s) to which women are relentlessly subjected. Through her work she points to the way women exist in society as an image of themselves.

‘Cindy Sherman. The Women’ takes its title from the 1936 all-female hit play by Clare Boothe Luce, a merciless ensemble piece about women’s interactions with women, of their own and different classes, and of different appearances. Twice made into feature films (1939 and 2008), it is exemplary of the genre of classical Hollywood ‘women’s film’ around which feminist film theory was formed. Moreover, not only the characters in her play but Boothe Luce herself is representative of the multifarious kinds of femininities explored by Cindy Sherman. As the 20th-century cult of fame and celebrity has transitioned into the 21st-century context of influencers and social media stars, Sherman’s deconstructions of gender, wealth and privilege remain of acute relevance. Sherman’s work reveals to us the degree to which we all construct and perform our identities; each iteration of her performance is a new and unique character. Through these images she has become the leading exponent of the subgenre which combines performance with photography, drawing our attention to the fact that identity is complex, constructed and performed.

The layers of media are important in this picture of complexity; the role of film, fashion, magazines and classical portrait photography is part of the subject matter. In the Ominous Landscape images from 2010, elaborately dressed female figures stand against vast and inhospitable landscapes. The figures seem eerily displaced, digitally superimposed on island landscapes shot on Capri, Stromboli, Iceland and Shelter Island, New York; now they are shown on an island within an island, Illa del Rei in Menorca. This series of photographs evolved from an editorial project for Pop magazine, featuring clothes and accessories chosen by Cindy Sherman from the Chanel archives. The garments range from 1920s haute couture designed by Coco Chanel herself to contemporary creations by Karl Lagerfeld. The sumptuous costumes create a striking contrast with the bleak intensity of the surrounding landscapes, whilst the female figures loom larger than the surrounding natural world in a reversal of the Romantic hierarchy.

Cindy Sherman

Untitled #550

2010/2012

Chromogenic color print

153 x 302.3 cm / 60 1/4 x 119 in

© Cindy Sherman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

It was from this project that the Flappers series developed from 2016 to 2018, focusing on the young women who challenged social norms and fashions in the 1920s as a form of empowerment, emancipation and radical modernity, some emulating Hollywood stars, who pose in glamorous attire with heavy and stylised makeup. The series also addresses aging; however, the protagonists are shown decades from their heyday seemingly unaware they are past their prime. Nevertheless, Sherman’s depictions seem more nuanced and sympathetic than the harsh image of Norma Desmond, the archetypal deluded silent-era actress in Sunset Boulevard. 

Cindy Sherman had previously worked on series addressing women of social standing and the aging process, works from which feature in the exhibition. These include one of the exceptionally grandiose Society Portraits from 2008, in which Cindy Sherman introduced ornate frames and experimented with a green screen to create fantasy environments for women of the upper echelons of society. Such backdrops heighten the isolation of the characters Cindy Sherman portrays and focus attention on the heavily made-up women absorbed by their wealth and status. She later adopted the personas of socialites and fashionistas in a commission for Harper’s Bazaar in 2016, making a series of images of women in designer clothes and accessories, within various landscape settings. In these works, she experimented with multiple exposures to duplicate the women depicted, suggesting a fractured and unstable sense of identity.

A selection of the iconic Untitled Film Stills sits at the centre of the exhibition, a series of black-and-white photographs originally conceived as a group of imaginary film stills from a single actress’s career. Inspired by 1950s and ‘60s Hollywood, film noir, B movies and European art-house films, Sherman’s plethora of invented characters and scenarios imitated the style of production shots used by movie studios to publicize their films. The images are evocative of certain character types and genres, but always intentionally ambiguous, leaving room for the viewer to imagine their own narratives, and even insert themselves into the work.

Pre-dating the Film Stills, are works from Sherman’s Bus Riders and Murder Mystery series, both created in 1976, and a selection of the Line Up images, made in 1977, all while she was still a student at Buffalo State College in upstate New York. Highlighting the foundations of Sherman’s conceptual thinking, the ‘Bus Riders’ embody a range of cultural stereotypes and everyday personalities across American society, harnessing poses, clothes and facial expressions that bring familiar characters to life. In contrast, the ‘Murder Mystery’ and ‘Line Up’ series have a decided staginess and overt theatricality, and even a deliberate melodrama, to the characters and poses. In some, the act of photographing is made visible through the capturing of the cable-release and the marks on the studio floor; here, Sherman is pointing to her medium and exposing her process as part of the act of creation. In these very early series Sherman was working through the process of adopting different personas and merging the role of photographer, model and storyteller. 

Throughout her career, Sherman’s relentless focus on the diversity of womanhood emphasises the play of difference rather than sameness within gender categories, making the idea of womanhood expansive rather than restrictive.

Cindy Sherman

Untitled Film Still #24

1978

Gelatin silver print

20.3 x 25.4 cm / 8 x 10 in

© Cindy Sherman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Cindy Sherman

Untitled (the actress at the murder scene)

1976/2000

Gelatin silver print

25.4 x 20.3 cm / 10 x 8 in

© Cindy Sherman

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

ARTIST CINDY SHERMAN

Born in 1954 in Glen Ridge NJ, Cindy Sherman lives and works in New York NY. Her groundbreaking work has interrogated themes around representation and identity in contemporary media for over four decades. Coming to prominence in the late 1970s with the Pictures Generation group—alongside artists such as Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Louise Lawler—Sherman first turned her attention to photography at Buffalo State College where she studied art in the early 1970s. Utilising prosthetics, theatrical effects, photographic techniques and digital technologies, she has channelled and reconstructed familiar personas known to the collective psyche, often in unsettling ways, and has explored the more grotesque aspects of humanity through the lens of horror and the abject.

Recent solo exhibitions include FOMU Fotomuseum Antwerp, ‘Cindy Sherman. Anti-Fashion’, Antwerp, Belgium (2024); Museum of Cycladic Art, ‘Cindy Sherman at Cycladic: Early Works’, Athens, Greece (2024); Photo Elysée, ‘Cindy Sherman’, Lausanne, Switzerland (2024); Espace Louis Vuitton Seoul, ‘Cindy Sherman. On Stage – Part II’, Seoul, Korea (2024); The Serralves Foundation, ‘Cindy Sherman. Metamorphosis’, Porto, Portugal (2022); National Portrait Gallery, ‘Cindy Sherman’, London, UK (2010), Fondation Louis Vuitton, ‘Cindy Sherman’, Paris, France (2010).

Also on view at Hauser & Wirth Menorca:

Mika Rottenberg. Vibrant Matter

Through 26 October 2025

HAUSER & WIRTH MENORCA

Illa del Rei, Mahon, Menorca, Balearic Islands, Spain

www.hauserwirth.com

Mika Rottenberg @ Hauser & Wirth Menorca - "Vibrant Matter" Exhibition

Mika Rottenberg. Vibrant Matter

Hauser & Wirth Menorca

Through 26 October 2025

Mika Rottenberg

Lampshare (with plant 2)

2025

Milled reclaimed household plastic and plant

Lighting component: resin and electric hardware

40.6 x 35.6 x 30.5 cm / 16 x 14 x 12 in

© Mika Rottenberg

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Mika Rottenberg

Lampshare (bx 1.4)

2025

Milled reclaimed household plastic and plant

Lighting component: resin and electric hardware

91.4 x 83.8 x 86.4 cm / 36 x 33 x 34 in

© Mika Rottenberg

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Mika Rottenberg

Cosmic Generator (Loaded #2) (Video Still)

2017/2018

Single channel video installation, sound, color; 26:36 min

Dimensions variable

© Mika Rottenberg

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

For decades Mika Rottenberg has addressed our relationship with capitalist systems of production and labor, realizing a labyrinth of disparate worlds through seductive multidimensional works. She draws attention to the absurdity of our global situation, harnessing imagery that is simultaneously pleasurable and troubling, blurring facts with fiction, the natural with the artificial.

Mika Rottenberg’s first solo exhibition in Spain features the celebrated video installations, ‘Cosmic Generator’ (2017) and ‘Spaghetti Blockchain’ (2019), alongside her latest Lampshares (2024-2025), carved from bittersweet vines and reclaimed plastic. Perhaps the best introduction to Rottenberg’s oeuvre, the surreal and subversive ‘Cosmic Generator’ explores globalization, labor and spectacle, juxtaposing existing real-world industry with Rottenberg’s own, often unexpected, manufacturing systems. Mika Rottenberg illustrates the absurdity of humanity’s rampant production and consumption. The distinction between fantasy architecture and real space is blurred as Rottenberg collapses the distance between seemingly disconnected locations—filmed on-site at a market for plastic goods in Yiwu, China and at the border between Mexico and California—while mixing them with elements of magical realism shot in a studio and objects displaced within the installation itself.

Mika Rottenberg

Spaghetti Blockchain (Video Still)

2019

4k video installation with 7.1 surround sound, 

color; 18:15 min

Dimensions variable

© Mika Rottenberg

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Similarly, in ‘Spaghetti Blockchain,’ the viewer travels through a universe of incongruous scenarios that evoke a range of sensory reactions: footage of vibrant ASMR performances, Siberian Tuvan throat singers, the CERN antimatter factory and a mechanical harvester on a potato farm coalesce and meld. Running throughout is a concern with how humans manipulate matter and their relationship with the material world. ‘I am interested in these human-made systems where the starting point is to have no clue what is really going on and to try to impose a certain logic on things, and the madness of that,’ Mika Rottenberg explains. The title refers to blockchain technology, which allows for data to be governed by its own perpetual movement within a cluster of computers rather than being owned or controlled by a single entity. Like a blockchain, Mika Rottenberg merges images and sounds to create fast-shifting connections between a diverse range of sources that weave themselves together with no resolution as the artist excavates and examines systems of production, commerce and control.

In her exploration of humanity’s paradoxical attraction to toxicity, Mika Rottenberg has reframed the artist studio as an incubator for the regenerative production of her Lampshares, a series of functional sculptures that she began in 2023. Working alongside Inner City Green Team and Gary Dusek in New York, Mika Rottenberg combines carved bittersweet vines that choke forests in Upstate New York with reclaimed plastic that has been mined and extracted as a natural resource and is now re-molded into ‘urban gemstones.’ The natural and the artificial blend together, with Rottenberg’s processing of the plastic recasting its smooth, shiny surfaces into imperfect, handmade-looking forms. Sharing the seductive but unsettling combination of lyricism and wit that characterizes the artist’s practice, the Lampshares bring the concerns with capitalist systems of production that Mika Rottenberg has previously animated primarily through metaphorical and conceptual works into the sculptural space. Imbued with new meaning and value through regenerative systems of creation, these otherwise toxic and invasive materials are transformed into unique lamps that propose a creative alternative to current, extractive systems of mass production and consumption.

Alongside the Lampshares, Mika Rottenberg presents a selection of recent drawings that echo the concerns of her film, installation and sculptural output through a unique vocabulary of recurring symbols and icons. Bodily features such as human limbs and fingerprints harmonize with the organic, oddly sexual forms of the Lampshares and gesture towards the concern with the non-normative women’s bodies and the role of female labor in Rottenberg’s film works. Allusions to circularity, meanwhile, parallel both the circular systems that organize her films and the focus on sustainable production methods. Running throughout Rottenberg’s playful oeuvre and its synthesis of absurd, disparate parts are interconnected themes of appropriation, distortion and reinvention, production, consumption and hyper-capitalism that highlight both our endless difference from one another and the network of commodities and actions that bind us together.

Artist Mika Rottenberg

Argentina-born, New York-based artist Mika Rottenberg is devoted to a rigorous practice that combines film, architectural installation and sculpture to explore ideas of labor and production in our contemporary hyper-capitalist world. Her solo exhibition ‘Antimatter Factory’ is currently on view at Kunst Haus Wien, Austria until 10 August 2025, having traveled from the Musée Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland (2024). ‘Queer Ecology’ at Lehmbruck Museum, Germany is on view from 27 September 2025 – 22 February 2026. Other recent European solo presentations include the Louisiana Museum in Humlebæk, Denmark (2021) and the premiere of her first feature-length film ‘REMOTE’ (2022), co-created with Mahyad Tousi and commissioned by Artangel, United Kingdom; the Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, at Tate Modern, London in 2022. ‘Installations II: Video from the Guggenheim Collections’ was on view at Guggenheim Bilbao from 2009 – 2010. Mika Rottenberg was the recipient of the 2019 Kurt Schwitters Prize, which recognizes artists who have made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary art. In 2018, she was winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s James Dicke Contemporary Art Prize, which recognizes an artist younger than 50 who has produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity.

HAUSER & WIRTH MENORCA

Illa del Rei, Mahon, Menorca, Balearic Islands, Spain

www.hauserwirth.com

Mika Rottenberg. Vibrant Matter

Hauser & Wirth Menorca, 10 May – 26 October 2025

Carlos Motta @ MACBA, Barcelona - Exhibition "Pleas of Resistance"

Carlos Motta. Pleas of Resistance

MACBA, Barcelona

21 February – 26 October 2025

CARLOS MOTTA

Untitled Self-Portrait, #4, 2019

© Carlos Motta

Pleas of Resistance is the first major European museum exhibition dedicated to Colombian artist CARLOS MOTTA (Bogota, 1978). A resident of New York for many years, the artist began his career in the 1990s and is an important figure in contemporary art. The artist’s work can only be understood through his commitment to social and political movements, specifically the politics of gender identity and sexuality and, above all, his staunch commitment to giving voice to dissident expressions in the face of dominant normative discourses. This point permeates all of his work, which pivots on two dialogical axes: intersectionality and queerness.

The MACBA exhibition acknowledges the relevance of Motta’s projects and discourses on issues of violence, domination, religion and politics. It does so with pieces that address discrimination in increasingly conservative political environments (such as in the United States), the plight of undocumented immigrants around the world, and Latin American decolonization projects.

Pleas of Resistance covers more than twenty-five years of the artist’s practice, in which his early explorations of photographic self-portraiture are exhibited alongside his most recent performances and video installations. The exhibition focuses on the rigor of Motta’s artistic research, on his continuous questioning of the archive – its violence and silencing, its fears and desires. Motta’s work challenges the imposition of Eurocentric epistemologies – from the time of the conquest and colonial period in the Americas to the present day – and considers the legacy of religion as a perpetrator and disruptive vehicle of coloniality.

Pleas of Resistance provides a unique opportunity for an in-depth look at Motta’s work and some of the pieces that have made him an important reference for both artistic and political activism, such as We Who Feel Differently (2012), which addresses the LGTBI+ movement; Legacy (2019), which reflects upon the impact of AIDS; Air of Life (2023), a collaborative multimedia installation that examines experiences of marginalization and the intersectional repercussions of colonialism; the installation When I Leave This World (2022), which shows the performance of a person who adopts an animal aesthetic; and Nefandus (2013), a video trilogy that investigates pre-Hispanic and colonial homoeroticism, one of which is part of the MACBA collection.

Alongside the exhibition, the museum hosts a new edition of La Internacional Queer/Cuir: a series of debates, lectures, live art, music and performance presented at MACBA, coordinated by the public programmes area. The past and present HIV/AIDS pandemic will be the common thread, with a focus on Global South perspectives. A publication compiling the contributions of the eight previous editions of La Internacional Queer as well as this new edition will be published upon the exhibition’s conclusion.

Carlos Motta. Pleas of Resistance is curated by Agustín Pérez-Rubio in collaboration with María Berríos.

MACBA

Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona

Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona

Plaça dels Àngels, 1, Ciutat Vella, 08001 Barcelona

www.macba.cat

Marina Vargas @ Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid - " Revelations" Exhibition - Curated by Semíramis González

Marina Vargas: Revelations

Curated by Semíramis González

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

10 February - 4 May 2025

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum presents Marina Vargas: Revelations, the eighth edition of the “Kora” series, which promotes work by contemporary women artists from a gender perspective. In this project, curated by Semíramis González, Marina Vargas (born Granada, 1980) reveals and draws attention to the contributions and legacy of women who have been silenced throughout history, particularly in the realm of the sacred and spiritual. 

Taking Mary Magdalene as the principal axis of her project, Marina Vargas creates a journey in which she explores other female figures who have been relegated to a secondary position in the worlds of art, culture and religion, combining them with words, tarot readings and other interpretative media that form part of the artist’s creative universe, her life story and personal experience.

Revelations has been conceived by Marina Vargas and her curator as a totality in which the artist’s creations, the majority made expressly for the exhibition, establish a dialogue with spaces in the Museo Thyssen and works in its collections, as well as with other loans from institutions such as the Museo Nacional de Escultura. The result is an unprecedented whole, in which space, painting, drawing, sculpture and sound are all involved.

The exhibition comprises four sections, each presided over by a large tarot card. The first of them, Word, features an installation in which different phrases taken from different women who have inspired the artist can be read in sign languages (Spanish and universal). These women include feminist theologians such as Cynthia Bourgeault, artists like Hannah Wilke, historical figures like Joan of Arc and authors such as Kate Millet, while current feminist slogans are also included. The same space displays the sculpture Mary Magdalene (2024), a pair of joined hands that form a triangle symbolising the uterus, a gesture taken from feminist actions. The two works establish a dialogue with the painting Hercules at the Court of Omphale (1537) by Hans Cranach in which hands are particularly important in the depicted scene.

The exhibition continues with the section Vision, which focuses on the process of disease. All the elements in this room allude to the breast cancer which the artist suffered in the past and which has significantly influenced her creative career: the series Mère-Mer (2024), a group of crabs climbing down the wall (in allusion to the astrological symbol of cancer); The Feminine Divine (2024), a tapestry with the Cross of Camargue embroidered on it and on top of it a group of snails, used for divinatory reading in the Afro-Cuban religion and which are part of Vargas' creative process; and Votive Offerings (2022), comprising moulds used for radiotherapy sessions covered in gold. This section concludes with the Tarot card of “The World”, a symbol of rebirth without the need to die.

The third room, Body, is presided over by two Reverse Pietàs: one of them, suspended from the ceiling, forms a contrast with the other cracked one on the floor, which seems to have been opened up to reveal what is concealed and which is the last in a series of seven produced by Vargas in the last decade. These sculptures establish a dialogue with Madonna of the Dry Tree (ca. 1465) by Petrus Christus, a panel in which the Virgin and Child are surrounded by the Tree of Knowledge. Withered since the Original Sin, it blooms again after the conception of Christ. This space culminates with the “Strength” tarot card symbolising all triumphant women.

The exhibition closes with the room Aegyptiaca, dominated by Luis Salvador Carmona’s carving of Saint Mary of Egypt (1734-1766), also known as Maria Aegyptiaca, from the Museo Nacional de Escultura. This final room in the exhibition, which is completely black, establishes a dialogue between Mary of Egypt and a photograph of Vargas after her mastectomy entitled Noli Me Tangere. Incredulity (2020). That work is in turn accompanied by the panel of Mary Magdalene by Derick Baegert of 1477-78. The exhibition concludes with a series of drawings of different tarot cards created by Vargas as part of her working process. The voice of María Botto, who played Mary Magdalene in the film Risen (2016), reads out the meaning of each of them.

Revelations, in the words of its curator Semíramis González, is "a unique exhibition by Marina Vargas, but also an investigation of many of the issues that have shaped her corpus of artistic creation and research throughout her career. The rupture of the canon is presented not only by the fact of naming women who have remained hidden within the context of the sacred (regardless of religion) but also due to her interest in dismantling patriarchal structures in the history of art which have constructed a reifying image of women, relegating them to the margins of the account."

MARINA VARGAS (born Granada, 1980) lives and works in Madrid. Vargas graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Granada in 2003 and subsequently undertook the doctoral courses at that university and a Masters in Production and Research into Artistic Languages in 2011. Her work encompasses a range of formats, including photography, sculpture, and painting. Within her research Vargas reassesses the models and archetypes inherited from Western representational traditions, questioning visual codes formulated in the past to define artistic languages. Her work is represented in numerous institutional collections, including those of: Artium, Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo, Vitoria-Gasteiz; CA2M, Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Móstoles, Madrid; CAAM–Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; Colección Fundación Canaria para el Desarrollo de la Pintura (FCDP), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria; CAC–Málaga, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga; Colección María Cristina Masaveu; Centre d’Art Contemporain Essaouira, Ifitry, Morocco; Benetton Foundation Collection, Italy; Colección Fundación Enaire; the EWA Art Collection, Miami; and the Sara Vance Waddell Collection, USA, among others.

Curator: Semíramis González

Coordinator: Laura Andrada, Curatorial Department, Museo Nacional ThyssenBornemisza

Publication: Catalogue with texts by Semíramis González

The exhibition will travel to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Querétaro (Mexico), where it will be shown from September 2025 to January 2026.

MUSEO NACIONAL THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA

Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014, Madrid

www.museothyssen.org

Gabriele Münter Retrospective @ Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid - "Gabriele Münter. The Great Expressionist Woman Painter" Exhibition

Gabriele Münter

The Great Expressionist Woman Painter

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid

12 November 2024 - 9 February 2025

Gabriele Münter Painting at the Easel in Open Air, 

Kochel, July 18, 1902

Photograph of Wassily Kandinsky

The Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, Munich

Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) was one of the founders of The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), the legendary group of Expressionist artists based in Munich which emerged in late 1911, to which Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, among others, also belonged. Gabriele Münter is well known as an artist in Germany but it is only in recent years that she has started to enjoy greater recognition in the rest of Europe. The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, which has four of her paintings in its collections, is now organising the first retrospective on the artist in Spain, thus continuing its project of researching and highlighting the work of so many great women artists and the place they deserve in the history of art.

Through 145 paintings, drawings, prints and photographs the exhibition aims to present not only Gabriele Münter’s artistic activities and the rich complexity of her work, but also an artist who rebelled against the limitations imposed on women of her day and who became one of the outstanding figures of German Expressionism at the start of the 20th century. Throughout her extensive career, on numerous occasions Gabrielle Münter demonstrated an ability to adapt, a tireless desire for experimentation and an openness to what was new or different. In her paintings, with their precise lines and intense colours, she immerses the viewer in her private world and through her highly perceptive gaze presents lovers, everyday objects, landscapes and herself, all refined to their essence.

The exhibition is the result of a collaborative project between the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation and the Städtische Galerie am Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau in Munich. It benefits from the support of the Comunidad de Madrid and the Art Foundation Mentor Lucerne. 

After its showing in Madrid the exhibition will be seen at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris from 4 April through 24 August 2025.

The exhibition opens with a section in which the artist presents herself to the public through a series of self-portraits and photographs, then continues along a thematic-chronological route which covers Münter’s entire, lengthy career. An extensive initial chapter is devoted to her beginnings as an amateur photographer, analysing how her relationship with this modern mode of expression, less codified than traditional fine arts, was fundamental for her later development. Her activity as a painter is then presented through a journey that starts with the works created on her travels around Europe and North Africa with her partner Wassily Kandinsky, and continues in a large space dedicated to her masterpieces from the Blue Rider period. Finally, the exhibition focuses on Münter’s exile in Scandinavia during World War I and the different paths of expression she encountered following her return to Germany in the 1920s. 

Gabriele Münter: Reflections and shadows

The first room of the exhibition is devoted to the self-portraits which Münter created throughout her career, but particularly between 1908 and 1914, the years when she was one of the key figures in the rise of Expressionism in Munich. Also included are a number of photographs in which the shadow of the artist appears projected in the image, a resource that functioned to include her figure in the composition and which she sometimes employed in her paintings, as in Boating (1910) and Breakfast of the Birds (1934), in both of which the painter is represented from behind in the foreground.

Gabriele Münter: Begginings in black and white

Between 1898 and 1900 Gabriele Münter visited the United States, a country where her parents, emigrants who had returned to Germany during the Civil War, had met and married and which she was now visiting for the first time. During those two years she lived with her maternal relatives in various places, becoming familiar with the reality of American society at first hand and recording everything that caught her attention in her sketchbooks. After being gifted one of the new Kodak portable cameras in 1899, photography made a decisive contribution to Gabriele Münter’s activities as a draughtsman and she experimented with the creative possibilities of the new medium. 

The exhibition brings together a selection of 20 photographs of the more than 400 which Gabriele Münter took during tat decisive trip, images highly valued both for their artistic quality and their importance for her creative development. For the first time in these photographs she explores themes such as landscape, urban views, domestic interiors and the world of work, which would later become the subjects of her paintings. Her interest in capturing moments and the concept of working in series are other aspects that would subsequently emerge in her paintings, as well as her simple and analytical way of looking, capable of structuring space through a few lines, which is one of the principal characteristics of her pictorial compositions.

Gabriele Münter: Outdoors

After her return to Germany in 1901 Münter embarked on her artistic training in Munich. The following year this would take her to the Phalanx art school of which Kandinsky was a founder and teacher. Its painting classes proved crucial for Münter’s decision to opt for painting rather than sculpture, which had initially attracted her. Between 1902 and 1903 she took part in the painting trips organised by Kandinsky in rural areas of Bavaria where she produced her first oil paintings. Subsequently, between 1904 and 1908, the two travelled around Europe and North Africa together and moved to Paris for a year, where they had the opportunity to see the work of Gauguin, Van Gogh and the Fauves, led by Matisse. During these trips Münter pursued her interest in photography and painted outdoors, often recording the same image with her camera and brushes. These paintings are stylistically linked to late Impressionism, revealing a greater interest in volume than in the study of atmospheric effects.

Gabriele Münter: The discovery of Murnau

After returning to Munich in the summer of 1908 Münter visited the Bavarian town of Murnau in the foothills of the Alps, again with Kandinsky and in the company of the artists and couple Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin. Their close collaboration resulted in works considered foundational for South German Expressionism: “It was a wonderful, interesting and happy creative time in which we argued a lot about art.” Münter's paintings reveal the transition from her previous approach, with its short, heavily charged brushstrokes, to a new fluid style, expressed in compositions in which she progressively eliminated the anecdotal and gave free rein to colour. The following year she and her fellow artists returned to the town and acquired a house on the outskirts which would become her refuge and the epicentre of the early 20th-century, German artistic avant-garde.

Gabriele Münter: People

“Painting portraits is the most daring and difficult, the most spiritual, the most extreme endeavour for an artist.” Gabriele Münter was particularly interested in the depiction of people, as evident in her sketchbooks and photographs, with a clear preference for women and children. In these works she reveals a skill in combining a reduction of compositional elements with a fidelity to the physical resemblance of the person portrayed. Following the stylistic change that took place in her work in Murnau, her portraits employ more intense colours, simplified shapes and darker outlines. Above all, Gabriele Münter painted people from her immediate surroundings, initially locating them against a plain background then later moving towards compositions in which the figures are integrated into genre scenes, located in interiors or in a dialogue with the objects around them.

Gabriele Münter: Interiors and objects

Between 1909 and the outbreak of World War I, Gabriele Münter alternated winters in Munich with long periods at her home in Murnau, which became the subject of some of her paintings and photographs. The utopian ideal she shared with Kandinsky of creating an artistic community linked to the rural world and connected with nature led them to renounce the comforts of the big city and lead a simple life, dressing in typical peasant costume and working on their vegetable patch. Gabriele Münter discovered the painting on glass typical of the area, a type of folk art with simplified forms and expressive colours divided by thick, dark outlines, which fascinated her as it involved many of the elements she aspired to achieve in her painting. She acquired a number of pieces of this type which she used to decorate her home, as seen in her paintings and photographs. They became key motifs in her still lifes, in which she sought to connect with the spirituality of these primarily devotional objects. She also learned the technique herself and was the first of the group to produce her own works on glass.

Gabriele Münter: The blue horsewoman

From 1909 Gabriele Münter actively participated in the New Association of Artists in Munich, in the exhibitions of The Blue Rider group from late 1911 and in the publication of its almanac of the same name. The photographs she took at this time demonstrate her role in the group, as well as her sophisticated understanding of the importance of visually recording these events. Like the rest of her companions, Münter aspired to achieve a form of expression that responded to what Kandinsky defined as “inner need”; a genuinely individual form of expression that led each of them to develop a different style even though they shared common sources of inspiration. Like all these artists, Münter was interested in European folk culture and the art of other continents: she collected children's drawings and copied some of them in a process of “unlearning” which she considered fundamental to her artistic evolution, and although she was an essentially figurative painter, on occasions she came close to abstraction.

Gabriele Münter: Exile in Scandinavia

Following the outbreak of World War I Münter settled in neutral Sweden in July 1915, remaining there until 1920. She encountered the local art scene, which welcomed her as an important representative of the international avant-garde. The decorative Expressionism of these painters, influenced by their master Matisse, soon left its mark on some of her works, resulting in a more graphic style and softened colours. Münter travelled round Sweden and Norway in search of new pictorial motifs to replace her much-missed Murnau, producing landscapes with a greater emphasis on narrative and including small figures. Financial necessity led her to execute numerous commissioned portraits during these years, but she also painted a series of symbolic portraits representing different states of mind, works that reveal a renewed interest in human beings, particularly women.

Gabriele Münter: A nomadic life

When Gabriele Münter returned to Germany in 1920 her close circle of artists had disappeared, including Kandinsky who had returned to Russia during the war and embarked on a new relationship there. With no fixed address, during those years Gabriele Münter focused on her activity as a graphic artist and on portraying the free and emancipated women with whom she socialised. “It was years before I had a studio. The sketchbook was my friend and the drawings the reflection of what I saw with my eyes […]. The result was mere sketches, works of the moment, sketches in a couple of strokes […]. They contained everything I had to say.” After living in various places, in 1925 she moved to Berlin, where she renewed her contacts with the German art world and attended Arthur Segal’s art school. A number of her works from the 1920s are stylistically linked to New Objectivity in their aim of reducing the chromatic range and making any trace of the brushstrokes disappear, although Gabriele Münter never shifted her focus to the social critique associated with some of the artists of that movement. 

Gabriele Münter: Return to Murnau

After a fruitful period in Paris between October 1929 and June 1930 Gabriele Münter’s itinerant life came to an end in 1931 when she permanently moved into her house in Murnau. The streets and surrounding landscapes once again became the principal themes and motifs of many of her works, paintings in which she frequently revived her own Expressionist tradition. During the years of the Third Reich Münter continued to live in Murnau, progressively reducing her public presence. The end of World War II led to a progressive rediscovery of her art and her reputation started to grow through numerous exhibitions and acquisitions of her work by museums and collectors. Gabriele Münter continued to work in the last years of her life. Some of her final paintings were versions of previous works in which she reflected on her life and artistic career.

On the occasion of her 80th birthday in 1957 Gabriele Münter made a large donation to the Lenbachhaus of works by her own hand and by other members of The Blue Rider group which she had kept hidden in her house during the Nazi period. The result was to transform the Lenbachhaus into the key museum for that artistic movement.

Publications: Catalogue with texts by Marta Ruiz del Árbol, Anna Storm and Isabelle Jansen. Educational guide and audio guide (Spanish and English). Gabriele Münter. Las tierras azules, comic by Mayte Alvarado, co-published with Astiberri.

Curators: Marta Ruiz del Árbol, curator of Modern Painting at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza; Isabelle Jansen, director of the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation, and Mattias Mühling, president of the Gabriele Münter and Johannes Eichner Foundation and director of the Städtische Galerie am Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München, Munich.

MUSEO NACIONAL THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA

Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014, Madrid

www.museothyssen.org

Exceptional Picture Frames @ Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Exceptional Picture Frames

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

7 October 2024 - 21 January 2025

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza is presenting a display of eleven paintings from its permanent collection dating from the 14th to 17th centuries with frames - three of them the original ones - that reveal the artistic importance of this element. Made in Spain, France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, they exemplify a wide variety of styles which reflect both the artistic period in which they were made and changing tastes, principally in relation to furniture, while contributing additional aesthetic value to the works they accompany, embellish and protect. 

While the collection does not include a large number of the original frames, it does feature many old and important examples. Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza paid particular attention to this aspect of collecting and in the 1980s commissioned two scholarly studies of the frames in his collection. The examples chosen for the present exhibition are of a high technical and stylistic level, making them unique and valuable objects in themselves. They also provide additional information which assists in a more complete understanding of the historical and artistic context of the works they surround. 

Lorenzo Veneziano 

Portable Triptych with a central Crucifixion, ca. 1370 - 1375 

Tempera and gold on panel

Central panel: 83.6 x 30.7 cm

Lateral wings: 83 x 15 cm

Venician frame from 14th century

Carved and gilded wood. Original

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Jan van Eyck

The Annunciation Diptych, ca., 1433-1435

Oil on panel

Left wing ( The Archangel Gabiel): 38.8 x 23.2 cm

Right wing (The Virgin Mary): 39 x 24 cm

Frame: Flemish, 15th century

Carved and polychromed wood. Original

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Of the eleven paintings included in the exhibition, three have their original frames. One is the Portable Triptych with a central Crucifixion (ca. 1370-75) by Lorenzo Veneziano. Its frame, of a type termed “architectural”, is carved from the same panel on which the artist painted the work and imitates the portico of a Gothic church. Secondly, The Annunciation Diptych (around 1433-35) by Jan van Eyck falls within the tradition of Northern European Renaissance altarpieces and is unique in the fact that the artist painted two, trompe-l'oeil frames; a principal one imitating reddish marble and a secondary one that simulates grey stone, seemingly marble or alabaster. 

Wolfgang Beurer 

Portrait of Johann von Rückingen (recto), 1487

Oil on panel, 37,3 x 27.5 cm

Frame: German, 15th century

Carved wood. Original

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Wolfgang Beurer 

Figure with Coat-of-arms (verso), 1487

Oil on panel, 37,3 x 27.5 cm

Frame: German, 15th century

Carved wood. Original

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Finally, Portrait of Johann von Rückingen (recto) and Figure with Coat-of-arms (verso) (1487) by Wolfgang Beurer has a typically German Renaissance frame with pictorial decoration on the vertical moulding, indicating that it was made specifically for the painting.

Jacopo Bassano

The Parable of the Sower, ca., 1560

Oil on canvas, 139 x 129 cm

Frame: Tuscan, ca. 1650-1700

Curved and gilded wood

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

The frames in this display have characteristics and elements which reveal the diversity of styles and techniques used in the different geographical areas and chronological periods in which they were made. These features include the different types of decoration; from the zigzags and circular motifs on the possibly Spanish frame used for Portrait of a Young Man (1490s) by Andrea Solario to the foliate motifs on others such as the frame employed for Portrait of Doge Francesco Venier (ca. 1554-56) by Titian, made in Italy in the 17th century, and that of The Parable of the Sower (around 1560) by Jacopo Bassano, a style of decoration known as “Auricular Medici” which was devised to re-frame the paintings displayed by Cardinal Leopoldo de’ Medici in the Pitti Palace in Florence.

El Greco 

Christ with the Cross, ca. 1587 - 1596

Oil on canvas, 66 x 52.5 cm

Frame: French, Louis XIII style

Curved and gilded wood

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Foliate decoration is also to be seen on the moulding of the two works by El Greco present in the exhibition, which furthermore create interesting interplays of light and shade that add volume to the paintings and frames as a whole. These are Christ with the Cross (ca. 1587-1596), which has a French, Louis XIII-style frame, and The Immaculate Conception (ca. 1608-14), painted in collaboration with the artist’s son Jorge Manuel Theotokópoulos, which has a typical Spanish Baroque frame. 

Also notable is the use of parcel-gilt or luminolegno on the frame of View of a River Port with the Castel Sant'Angelo by the Master of the Monogram IDM, a technique employed in the Veneto based on the interaction of the gilding and the wood, and the sobriety of The West Façade of the Church of Saint Mary in Utrecht (1662) by Pieter Jansz. Saenredam, which has a Baroque frame typical of Holland and southern Germany, of a dark tone and made in hardwood with a decoration known as Dutch ripple.

The most recent frame in the exhibition is the one surrounding the painting by Michiel Sweerts Boy in a Turban holding a Nosegay (ca. 1658-61), which dates to between 1735 and 1750. Made in Rome, this type of frame was widely used in the 18th century and was named after two Italian painters, Carlo Maratta and Salvator Rosa. 

Curator: Mar Borobia, head of Old Master Painting at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Technical curator: María Eugenia Alonso, curator of Old Master Painting at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza

Room 17 of the Permanent Collection

Paseo del Prado, 8. 28014, Madrid

www.museothyssen.org

Metahaven Film Installation: Chaos Theory @ Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Metahaven: Chaos Theory

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 

Through June 9, 2024

Metahaven

Chaos Theory, 2021

Single channel film, 25 min. (film still)

Courtesy the artists

© Metahaven

Metahaven

Chaos Theory, 2021

Single channel film, 25 min. (film still)

Courtesy the artists

© Metahaven

Metahaven

Chaos Theory, 2021

Single channel film, 25 min. (film still)

Courtesy the artists

© Metahaven

Metahaven

Chaos Theory, 2021

Single channel film, 25 min. (film still)

Courtesy the artists

© Metahaven

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Metahaven: Chaos Theory, the year's first exhibition of Film & Video exhibition series. This program, celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2024, is permanently devoted to artistic practices associated with the moving image.

Chaos Theory is a unique film installation by Metahaven, the renowned collective founded by Amsterdam-based artists Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden in 2007. Encompassing a variety of mediums including moving images, graphics, interfaces, textile works, and theory, Metahaven is regarded as a forerunner of interdisciplinary practice today.

In Chaos Theory, Metahaven addresses the range of shifting emotions of childhood, sisterhood and parenthood in the connected existence of the film's two protagonists. The enthralling 25-minute film takes revolves around different moments in the dialogue of a child ‘X’ (Valentina Di Mondo) and an adult named ‘Y/Z’ (Georgina Dávid), as they play, walk and live together in a multi-lingual reality. Filled with poetic resonances and ingenious wordplay, their exchanges are set in open spaces as well as more intimate settings—an elevator, a room—all of them equally allegorical and dream-like. A sense of continuity between wakefulness and reverie, pervades the entire film, where the lightness of play alternates with conversations on existential time and gravity. Thus, Chaos Theory operates as a nonlinear tale that challenges distinctions between voices and thoughts, places and fantasy zones.

Shot on location in the outskirts of Amsterdam, the film’s infrastructural landscape appears in contrast with its open-ended poetics. Multiple vantage points, or screens within the screen, coexist at times. Sections of the screen are outlined in red, as in a video conference call, when a new motif appears in the story. Chaos Theory is presented in a newly conceived spatial installation that includes a large woolen carpet, conceived as a seating area for the audience. Graphic vectors and colour squares mingle in a densely tufted texture that is reminiscent of common upholstery in public transportation. This object somehow materializes X’s words: “I see us in things that are not us; in the drawings of the seats on the bus.”

In the anteroom, Metahaven’s film resonates with a multiplicity of textile works that the artists understand as equivalent to film stills. Thus, the presentation of Chaos Theory is expanded with a selection of embroidered objects created in the past four years, some of which are being exhibited publicly for the first time. These series—Arrows (2020), Blossoms (2021), Bus Seats (2023), and Murmurations (2024)— include jumpsuit jackets, plastic bags, and small tapestries on bus seat fabric. Beside them are the triptych Living Together in Stories (2022) and the single jacquard Versions and Waves (2020). Juxtaposing oneiric landscapes, interfaces, bird flocks and geographics, the artists invite us to challenge our certainties and envision a future defined by empathy, fluid identity, and acknowledged dependence.

Metahaven. Biography

Amsterdam-based Vinca Kruk (b. 1980) and Daniel van der Velde (b. 1971) founded the Metahaven collective in 2007. Their work encompasses filmmaking, writing, and design, and has presented solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; ICA London; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Asakusa, Tokyo; Izolyatsia Kyiv; e-flux, New York; Tick Tack, Antwerp; and State of Concept, Athens, among others; as well as participated in major group exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw; the Gwangju Biennale; the Sharjah Biennial; the Busan Biennale; Ghost:2561, Bangkok; and many others. Their work is featured in collections of the Sharjah Art Foundation, the National Gallery of Victoria, M HKA, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, among others.

Metahaven are artistic advisors at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam; affiliate researchers at Antikythera, Los Angeles; and heads of department at the Geo-Design MA at Design Academy Eindhoven. 

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO

Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Avenida Abandoibarra, 2 - 48009 Bilbao

www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus