Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía ( 25 / 09/ 2024 - 10 / 03 / 2025 )

Throughout her career, the painter Soledad Sevilla (Valencia, 1944) has developed a rigorous language based on the purity of line and colour and on the construction of forms based on geometric modules. This exhibition, curated by Isabel Tejeda, chronologically reviews the artist's career through more than a hundred works that range from her first steps at the Computing Centre of the University of Madrid to her current productions, some made specifically for the exhibition. The retrospective emphasises the artist's assertion that she has painted the same painting all her life, connecting her first works from the 1960s with her latest series such as Horizontes blancos or Esperando a Sempere, in which she pays tribute to her reference and friend Eusebio Sempere.

Although initially linked to the heterogeneous group of Spanish artists attached to the aesthetic principles of geometric abstraction —with whom she has maintained an affinity throughout her life—, Sevilla soon distanced herself from the use of the computer as a plastic tool. Between 1980 and 1982, she spent a stay in Boston that was fundamental to the development of her career. There she carried out, among other projects, the series Keiko, Stella and Belmont, composed of drawings of individual, fine and light lines that foreshadowed the sensation of vibration so characteristic of her later painting. Upon her return, the line, the patterns and the light as vehicles of emotion led the artist to work on two essential milestones of Spanish culture, Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez and the Andalusian architecture of the Alhambra in Granada —the city where she currently resides.

Museo Guggenheim Bilbao (28.06.2024 - 03.11.2024)

Yoshitomo Nara is one of the most celebrated artists of his generation. His work is widely recognized for its bold, cartoonish, large-headed, wide-eyed childlike figures that are both fascinating and at times menacing, defiant and insolent, or melancholic and insecure, and that have become increasingly serene and reflective over time. Although Nara did not immediately gain acceptance in the art world, his innovative graphic style is now fully established.

Nara's characters—his figures, animals, and hybrid beings—are a reflection of himself, a plastic representation of his innermost emotions and thoughts, and show the depth of his humanism. The sources of his creation are childhood memories—burned into his memory—his knowledge of music and literature, the history of Japanese and European art—enriched by his insatiable curiosity—as well as the stimulating, empathetic encounters he has had with people and cultures on his travels in Japan and abroad.

Known for his easy-going attitude and free spirit, the artist has always had a passion for folk, rock and underground punk music. From his deep involvement with humanity and society, his work, committed to the world we share, examines and proposes ideas about issues such as home, community, nature, the environment and the interrelations between these areas.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum New York ( May 17–September 29, 2024)

Jenny Holzer: Light Line presents a reimagination of Jenny Holzer’s landmark 1989 installation at the Guggenheim. The new manifestation of Holzer’s electronic sign, Installation for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1989/2024), transforms the building with an updated and expanded display of scrolling texts, featuring language from her iconic series, such as Truisms and Inflammatory Essays. Taking up three revolutions of the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed rotunda in the 1989 exhibition, the new installation climbs all six ramps up to the building’s oculus, realizing the artist’s original vision.

Light Line also features a selection of Holzer’s works from the 1970s to the present day, including paintings, works on paper, plaques, and stone pieces. Lee Quiñones, one of the originators of street art and a longtime collaborator of Holzer’s, has graffitied the walls of the museum’s High Gallery over the artist’s colorful Inflammatory Essays posters.

Center Pompidou Paris (March 27 - July 1, 2024)

Never before has an exhibition of this magnitude been dedicated to Constantin Brancusi. In fact, it exhibits a collection of around two hundred sculptures, as well as photographs, drawings, films, files, tools and studio furniture.

This presentation, organized on the occasion of the complete transfer of the Brancusi workshop as part of the renovation works of the Center Pompidou, provides a unique opportunity to re-examine the art of this great artist of the 20th century from another perspective. As a jewel of the Museum's collection since its legacy to the French State in 1957, the workshop constitutes the matrix of this retrospective, which brings together previously unpublished sculpture groups, thanks to important loans from prominent international museums.

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía - ( 21 February - 24 June 2024 )

To mark the centenary of the birth of Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012), the Museo Reina Sofía and Fundació Antoni Tàpies have organised one of the most complete exhibitions on the artist to date, spanning over 220 works from museums and private collections from all over the world to shine a light on his career arc from 1943 to 2012.
A self-taught artist, music lover and bibliophile, Tàpies constantly wrote and reflected on the human condition, his historical situation and artistic practice, particularly on the limits and contradictions of painting. His beginnings were marked by the legacy of historical avant-garde movements and his ties with, until the early 1950s, the Catalan avant-garde group Dau al Set, after which he embarked upon an extensive stage of experimentation with matter — characterised by the use of materials that were alien to artistic practice, for instance marble dust or cement — earning him international recognition.

From the 1960s onwards, he carried out a series of objectual undertakings, in which the matter present in his paintings began to take on the appearance of daily objects as he employed them to create three-dimensional works. At this time, his pollical commitment to anti-Francoism also became more clearly expressed in his work. The start of democracy in Spain, and with it a new cultural reality, coincided with fresh materic investigations, the incorporation of varnish and the influence of Eastern spirituality — reflecting his multiple interests — which would give rise to more refined works elevated with great lyricism. In the last two decades of his life, as one century made way for the next, a sense of nostalgia swept over Tàpies’s oeuvre, with an awareness of his advanced years, death and illness the presiding themes.
Through the selected works, some of which have not been shown together for many years, this exhibition foregrounds the prolific career of Tàpies, resituating his work and influences in recent art history

Würth Museum (Künzelsau, Germany) (17.12.2023 - 27.10.2024)

The Würth Museum (Künzelsau, Germany) exhibits Sculptors & Spaces: Anthony Caro and Eduardo Chillida, an exhibition that brings together around 70 sculptures and murals by two artists who would turn 100 years old in 2024. With their often expansive sculptures, Anthony Caro (1924-2013) and Eduardo Chillida (1924-2002) have left their mark in many places but they also share small-format pieces, as well as a diversity of materials used. The exhibition highlights the differences but also the similarities of the two sculptors, who constantly explored the realms of what was possible in terms of form, material and theme in sculpture.

With their work, both Caro and Chillida transcended existing borders, are recognized as representatives of sculptural abstraction and contributed significantly to the development of modern sculpture. His works are also represented in renowned collections and museums around the world and have long been an enrichment of the Würth

La Fondation Louis Vuitton ( Paris ) ( 18.10.2023 - 02.04.2024 )

The exhibition opens with intimate scenes and urban landscapes – such as visions of the New York subway – that dominate Rothko’s output in the 1930s, before his transition to a repertoire inspired by ancient myths and surrealism which Rothko uses to express the tragic dimension of the human condition during the War.
From 1946, Rothko makes an important shift towards abstract expressionism. The first phase of this switch is that of Multi-forms, where chromatic masses are suspended in a kind of equilibrium on the canvas. Gradually, these decrease in number, and the spatial organization of his painting evolves rapidly towards Rothko’s “classic” works of the 1950s, where rectangular shapes overlap according to a binary or ternary rhythm, characterized by shades of yellow, red, ochre, orange, but also blue, white…

In 1958, Rothko is commissioned to produce a set of wall paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant designed by Philip Johnson for the Seagram Building in New York – the construction of which is overseen by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Rothko later decides not to deliver the paintings and keeps the entire series. Eleven years later, in 1969, the artist donates nine of these paintings – which differ from the previous ones on account of their deep red hues – to the Tate Gallery, which dedicates a room in its collections exclusively to Rothko. this series is exceptionally presented in the Fondation exhibition.
In 1960, the Phillips Collection dedicates a permanent room – the first “Rothko Room” – to the artist. The room is designed in close collaboration with him and is also featured in the exhibition. In 1961, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organizes the first major retrospective, an exhibition that subsequently travels to several European cities (London, Basel, Amsterdam, Brussels, Rome, and Paris). In the 1960s, Rothko accepts other new commissions, most notably the chapel John and Dominique de Menil in Houston, which is inaugurated in 1971 and named the Rothko Chapel.

While Rothko favors darker tones and muted contrasts since the late 1950s, the artist never completely abandons his palette of bright colors, as evidenced by several paintings from 1967 and by the last red painting left unfinished in his studio. Even in the case of the 1969-1970 Black and Grey series, a simplistic interpretation of the work, associating grey and black with depression and suicide, is best avoided.These works are displayed in the tallest room in the Frank Gehry building, alongside Alberto Giacometti’s large-scale sculptural figures, creating an environment that is close to what Rothko had in mind for a UNESCO commission that was never realized.The permanence of Rothko’s questioning, his desire for wordless dialogue with the viewer, and his refusal to be seen as a “colorist” are all elements allowing a new interpretation of his multifaceted work in this exhibition.

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain - Paris ( 08/06 - 05/11 2023 )

Born in Melbourne in 1958 and living in the UK since 1986, Ron Mueck has developed a body of work which touches on the universal, and has profoundly renewed contemporary sculpture. His uncanny and convincing characters, always sculpted on an astonishing scale, take months, or sometime years, to create. From a period of just over twenty five years his total oeuvre consists of 48 works, the most recent to be completed in time for this exhibition’s opening.
The works of Ron Mueck, at once deeply mysterious and extremely genuine, imbue reality with a dreamlike quality inviting us to confront our own relationship to the body and, more broadly, to existence.

In its scale and ambition, the monumental installation Mass is the centrepiece of the exhibition and represents a milestone in the artist’s career. Commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia) in 2017, Mass comprises one hundred giant human skulls piled high and reconfigured by the artist for each venue. The installation offers a physical and psychological experience that captivates visitors and encourages them to reflect on fundamental aspects of human existence. The title alone provides a glimpse of the work’s diverse interpretations. The multiple meanings of the word “mass”, from disordered heap to formal religious ceremony, are starting points for each viewer’s personal encounter.
The iconography of the skull is itself ambiguous; associated with the brevity of human life in art history, and ubiquitous in popular culture. For Mueck, “The human skull is a complex object. A potent, graphic icon we recognise immediately. At once familiar and exotic, it repels and attracts simultaneously. It is impossible to ignore, demanding our attention at a subconscious level.”

Museo Picasso Málaga ( 09/05 -10/09 2023 )

Picasso’s sculptures were seemingly overshadowed by his paintings and played a secondary role in his prolific artistic career. The first exhibition in which his sculpture was shown was Hommage à Pablo Picasso at the Grand Palais and Petit Palais in Paris in 1966. The following year, the Tate Gallery, London, organised another exhibition devoted mainly to his sculpture; until then, his three-dimensional work had received little critical attention. However, sculpture was not a secondary concern for Picasso but a form of expression on a par with painting. According to Pierre Daix, ‘he was at least as great a sculptor as he was a painter, and for him these two aspects of his work were always complementary, for he had discovered very early on that the switching from one to the other enabled him to determine precisely what painting is and what sculpture is’.

Picasso Sculptor. Matter and Body is the first major exhibition in Spain devoted to this facet of Picasso’s work. The selection of pieces is intended to underline the central role played by the representation of the human body, taken as both a whole and as a fragment, in the Málaga-born artist’s œuvre.Like the rest of his artistic production, Picasso’s sculptures are notable for their innovation and use of unorthodox techniques and materials. Between modelling and construction, either in welded iron, wood or sheet metal, incorporating the void as a new element that was crucial to modern sculpture. Picasso’s interrelation of the various artistic disciplines can be seen in the Cubist principles of his paintings, which he translated into three dimensions in his sculptures, and in his use of found materials to create three-dimensional works, as in his collages. Drawings and two-dimensional planes of cut-out paper were transformed into sheets of metal that were folded to increase their volume. Cut and folded sheet metal was the last material that defined Picasso’s sculptural output. Translated into concrete or Corten steel, it gave rise to monumental works on an architectural scale.

Fundación Catalunya La Pedrera . Casa Mila (Barcelona) ( 31/03/2023 -l 23/07/2023 )

The most intimate and least known work of Jaume Plensa, one of the leading figures on the international contemporary art scene. A unique exhibition that shows, for the first time, the influence that literature, language and the alphabet have had on his work
Jaume Plensa (Barcelona, 1955) is one of the best-known sculptors from the international contemporary sculpture scene at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century. His current work focuses on the human figure, where two essential vectors converge: the material and words.

The exhibition at La Pedrera-Casa Milà, which covers Plensa’s work from 1990 to the present day, highlights some key aspects of his sculpture and is developed around the relationship between the artist’s creative world and letters as an element making up his work.
Plensa’s relationship with literature, and especially with poetry, will form the thread linking this exhibition, which will also include other recurring themes from his career: silence, sleep, music and family.

Museo ICO ( Madrid ) 02/15 - 05/07 2023

In this exhibition, Pablo Palazuelo. The line as a dream of architecture, brings together for the first time the twelve works and the twelve most representative projects that illustrate the most direct approximation that Pablo Palazuelo operated between his geometric investigations and architecture. The singularity of this exhibition, focused on the most architectural aspect of his work, has only been possible after the discovery of the legions of unpublished sketches and sketches that Palazuelo guarded jealously.
Some documents that are currently kept by the Pablo Palazuelo Foundation and that exemplify a work process that poses an astonishing similarity with that developed in an architectural project. Based on these sketches, it has been possible to outline the various stages until reconstructing his creative method, where the intense use of translucent paper and graphite lines stands out. The prominence of his compositions lies in the line. A line endowed with a poetic component inherited from Paul Klee's “line that dreams”, a quote that Palazuelo used to repeat and which serves as the origin of the title of the exhibition.

The theoretical foundation on which this exhibition is based is based on the doctoral thesis entitled Analysis of the geometry of Pablo Palazuelo from the vision of the architect, which reveals the links between the geometric process used by this artist and the architectural method. It constitutes a work where graphic studies of the different designs of Palazuelo were developed, which are currently being expanded as research work carried out in the field of the Polytechnic University of Madrid. In this way, a line of research is being consolidated whose results are being disseminated in various scientific publications where the analysis of Palazuelo's work is addressed.

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza ( 14 February - 18 June 2023 )

To mark the centenary of the birth of the British painter Lucian Freud (1922-2011) the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and the National Gallery in London are presenting a retrospective that features around 50 works.

Freud, one of the most outstanding figurative painters of the modern age, was born in Berlin and emigrated to London with his family in 1933, when the Nazis came to power. In his youth the family environment provided Lucian with a hefty and varied cultural background: his father was a renowned architect, his mother studied art history, and his grandfather was the famous inventor of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. In adulthood the artist grew to be a legend on account of his frenetic personal life, which saw him move with equal ease in aristocratic circles and the underworld.

From the outset, Freud favoured figurative art, concentrating on portraying human beings. Self-portraits, portraits and nudes account for most of his artistic production. His oeuvre has traditionally been linked to the so-called School of London, which was not so much a school as a group of London-based figurative artists such as Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Michael Andrews.

Galleria dell’Accademia & Palazzo Manfrin ( Venice, Italy ) ( April 20 – October 9, 2022 )

The Gallerie dell'Accademia di Venezia has organized an ambitious presentation of retrospective and new works by Anish Kapoor, the British artist famous for exploring the limits and materiality of the visible world through works that transcend their objecthood and invite wonderful interaction and sustaining Another prestigious venue, the historic Palazzo Manfrin in the Cannaregio district, complements this presentation with another important selection of large-scale, genre-defying works. Curated by art historian Taco Dibbits, director of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, this exhibition reveals the full and visionary range of Kapoor's practice, his pictorial sensibility and his sculptural prowess.

Anish Kapoor said: “The light and space of Venice, and the glories of the Accademia’s collection, have long been an inspiration to me. I have come to love this city and its painters, sculptors and architects, and I feel honoured to be invited to engage in a visual dialogue with them. I hope I will be able to add something to the vocabulary of colour and form that has been Venice’s gift to the world.”

Pabellón Villanueva. Real Jardín Botánico ( Madrid ) ( 29 March - 22 May 2022 )

Soledad Sevilla (Valencia, 1944), who in 2020 received the Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts, decided to donate that year a very important part of her artistic production to the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo. The artist, based between Granada and Madrid, has always felt very close to the Andalusian art scene. In addition, environments such as La Alhambra or El Rompido have served as sources of inspiration for some of her best-known series. The Soledad Seville exhibition. I will call you sheet has a selection of works closely related to the environment in which they are exhibited: the Villanueva Pavilion of the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid.

On the one hand, the tobacco dryers of the Vega de Granada and, on the other, a series of works that have the vegetable walls as a starting point. In both series, abstraction and repetition, characteristic from the beginning of her career, survive and are accentuated to end up providing these landscapes with a certain naturalistic sense. "Creation is stimulated with the gaze", as Soledad Sevilla herself points out, and this is what happened with the vision of the architecture of some dryers, which are the first works to be found in the exhibition itinerary and from which one of the the most important pictorial series of his career. As is evident in the long and fruitful career of Soledad Sevilla, constant research and tireless work show that not everything in life is random, since the desire for knowledge and its experience also determine our being and being in the world.

Palazzo Ducale, Piazza San Marco ( Venezia ) ( March 26 – October 29, 2022 )

Anselm Kiefer exhibits a series of new works in an installation of site-specific paintings in dialogue with one of the most important spaces of the Doge's Palace, the Sala dello Scrutinio, and with the history of Venice.
"Sometimes it happens that there is a convergence between past and present moments, and when they meet one experiences something similar to immobility in the hollow of the wave that is about to break. Having originated in the past but belonging to something deep down. more than it, these moments are as much part of the present as of the past, and what they generate is very important. " Anselm Kiefer

Palazzo Ducale has welcomed generations of artists including Giovanni Bellini, Vittore Carpaccio, Tiziano, Veronese, Tintoretto and many others. The monumental space of the Sala dello Scrutinio, the seat designated for the election of the Doge, is richly decorated with paintings that celebrate the power of the Most Serene Republic of Venice.
Philosophical and literary references have always been central to the understanding of Anselm Kiefer's work. The exhibition takes the title These writings, when burned, will finally give some light from the words of the Venetian philosopher Andrea Emo (1901-1983), whose writings Kiefer met six years ago. Kiefer's artistic method has deep consonances with Andrea Emo's philosophical thought.
In the installation at Palazzo Ducale, Kiefer also reflects on the unique position of Venice, located between North and South, and on its interaction between East and West, finding equally significant connections between the different cultures, the history of the city and the text of the tragic work by Goethe Faust: Second part (1832).

MADRE Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina (Naples) ( 25 March - 5 September 2022 )
The exhibition, curated by Gianfranco Maraniello, is the artist's first anthology after his death in 2019.
Lawrence Carroll (Melbourne 1954 - Cologne 2019) was a protagonist of the American art scene and, at the same time, a cosmopolitan interpreter of poetic perspectives that cannot be reduced to the history of the avant-garde and neo-avant-gardes; his work, in fact, is not part of a specific artistic trend, but investigates the very possibility of painting after and beyond the primacy of the schools and theories that dominated the second post-war period.

The exhibition itinerary requires an attempt to match the characteristic way of setting up his exhibitions, which have always favored the spatial and sentimental relationships of inhabiting places over the chronological succession or the thematic compartmentalization of works in paralyzing classifications as Carroll himself has argued, declaring: "In my painting forms are always changing, their very location in space changes, this restlessness of thought and spirit is what in a certain sense makes my works 'alive' and keeps them in motion".The exhibition is organized with the collaboration of Lucy Jones Carroll for the Lawrence Carroll Archive.

Museo Guggenheim Bilbao ( February 25 - August 21, 2022 )

At the end of World War II, Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) began exhibiting paintings that defied entrenched artistic values. He rejected principles of decorum and classical beauty, along with pretentions of expertise. Instead, he looked to the commonplace and the unheralded, employing crude materials, mundane subjects, and a style that spurned any outward sign of academic training. In this approach, Dubuffet was challenging norms that he believed obstructed authentic expression and devalued everyday experience. However, his goal was not only to reveal how threadbare cultural conventions were; he also wanted to illustrate the vitality of life freed from them. As he once claimed, “I would like people to see my work as a rehabilitation of scorned values and . . . make no mistake about it, a work of ardent celebration.”

Throughout his career, Dubuffet’s output was characterized by this celebratory impulse, as much as it was by his commitment to critiquing culture. His work of the 1940s and 1950s invited audiences to fundamentally reconsider the concept of beauty, and it demonstrated how worthy of admiration ordinary things could be—whether rocks, crumpled aluminum foil, or thickened paint. From the 1960s through the mid-1970s, Dubuffet showed the potential for adventure, creativity, and discovery that can be unleashed by diving into fantasy. For the last decade of his life, he strove to inspire a rethinking of the most basic structures of the mind, as he imagined the possibilities of approaching the world without the constraints of learned categories. This exhibition, drawn entirely from the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, offers a survey of his production from these defining decades. It seeks to affirm that across Dubuffet’s shifts in focus, he kept his ever-evolving project grounded in its dedication to sharing new and revitalizing perspectives with viewers.

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza ( Madrid ) ( February 22 - June 26, 2022 )

The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary are presenting Emotional Landscapes, an exhibition by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson (born Reykjavik, 1976) which for the first time brings together four of his most internationally renowned video installations, The Visitors (2012), The Man (2010), The End (2009) and God (2007), in addition to a series of watercolours. The exhibition conveys Kjartansson’s fascination with America, its landscapes and music through works set on a farm by the Hudson River and in the Rocky Mountains, accompanied by blues and jazz. It makes use of the museum’s new installation entitled American Art from the Thyssen Collection to establish dialogues with 19th and 20th century paintings.

Bothy Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park and The Weston Gallery ( Wakefield United Kingdom ) ( 19 February – 5 June 2022 )

David Nash has dedicated his artistic life to an evolving study of trees and wood, absorbing knowledge through haptic experience and close observation over decades. This new exhibition in The Weston Gallery is dedicated to the artist’s drawings inspired by trees, from the observational and documentary, through to intensely coloured, abstract works that capture the essence of their life force. Nash’s long association with YSP began over forty years ago and Full Circle marks an affinity between artist and organisation. In the early 1980s, he wrote in a letter regarding his forthcoming YSP residency: “environment and ecology are a first consideration for me as an artist”. This prescient and enduring occupation not only with the intersection of nature and art, but our direct human relationship with the natural environment, makes Nash’s body of work ever more pertinent as we address the climate crisis. A critical aspect of his admiration for trees, and one we might learn much from, is that “trees take just enough and give back more”.

Drawing is as central and constant in Nash’s practice as the trees it grows from. It is a way of learning about and understanding his subject, of finding form for ideas, recording and responding to forms from life. Works in The Weston Gallery, a significant number of which have never been exhibited before, will be enlivened by the natural light that floods the space and will resonate with the far-reaching landscape views.
Spanning four decades, a broad range of drawings reflects different processes and types of mark making, from fine graphite to thick, smoky charcoal, and bold swathes of colour achieved by applying pure pigment with cloth. This directness, seen across the exhibition, is a result of the fact that the artist draws immediately and rapidly from life in the landscape, driven by the particular qualities of trees and their environments. Other works reflect at greater distance, made in the studio and concentrating on embodying the sensation of a principal characteristic such as colour, as so vibrantly demonstrated in Red Tree (2021).

ACVIC Centre d’Arts Contemporànies ( Vic ) ( 04.02 – 23.04.2022 )

The project "Jordi Cano Universe" has been structured according to various subject-areas, the first of which attempts to construct an intellectual portrait, based upon the cultural references that accompanied him throughout his life, references that were repeated insistently until they became almost obsessive. An obstinate attitude, always faithful to those authors and artists to whom, as soon as he had discovered them, he devoted himself to absorbing more of their works, and from whom he could never distance himself. A cultural universe consumed with delight, which led him to "think with his feet, hands, eyes and head", an applied ideology, perhaps unconsciously at first, but which eventually became a pedagogical tool of the first order.