The Reina Sofía Museum will host nine temporary exhibitions for the season that runs from September of this year to June 2025, five of which, or 55%, are monographic exhibitions dedicated to women. Another exhibition will recover the figure of Néstor Martín-Fernández, a Canarian symbolist essential to Spanish art from the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, a time and territory to which the museum will pay special attention in the coming years to reorganize the space. rooms and the exhibition structure of the center. The process will begin this month with the placement of geometric sculptures in outdoor spaces and will continue until 2028. The intention is to exhibit the collection chronologically on the four floors of the Sabatini building.
“This season will be that of women artists, the performance“, the body and the analysis of the contributions of aesthetic theories to Spain at the beginning of the 20th century, in addition to bringing knowledge to other unknown latitudes,” said this Monday the director of the Reina Sofía, Manuel Segade, in office since June 2023. The first sampleSoledad Seville. Rhythms, intrigues, variablesopens on the 25th of this month and is part of the retrospectives featuring female creators. It will recover around a hundred works by the winner of the 2020 Velázquez Prize, who bases her painting on the construction of forms from geometric modules. The exhibition will then be installed at the IVAM in Valencia.
The next solo female exhibition will be that of the Portuguese of African origin Grada Kilomba, entitled Opera on a Black Venus. What would the ocean floor tell us tomorrow if it were emptied of its water today? (since November 20). A series of installations will be brought together in which the artist “connects the African ritual world with the great dramatic myths of the West. This reveals the micro-racism that exists in Europe with the prejudices against the slave plantations of the 19th century,” Segade said.
Lebanese Huguette Caland will follow with her first major retrospective, inaugurated on February 19, 2025, which is awarded to her in Europe. Nearly 200 works, including paintings, textiles and collages, will make up the exhibition which addresses the major migration issues of the 20th century. Having emigrated to Paris and then to Los Angeles, Caland experienced a critical moment in the art world, notably at the Pompidou and MoMA. “It is important to save a geometric and abstract painting, like that of Soledad, which surpasses what her male peers have done in this generation,” justified the director.
The next stop on the women’s exhibition agenda will be Hello everyone (February 26, 2025), by Laia Estruch, a Catalan designer specializing in performancewho uses gymnastic acrobatics to create sounds. The proposed cycle of female artists, which Segade has already started in some way with the Eva Lootz exhibition in May, will end with Marisa González (May 21, 2025). The Bilbao native experimented with new technologies of communication and image reproduction in the 1970s. The museum director defines her as “a transcendental woman of Spanish art and one of the pioneers of feminism in the early 1960s.”
Rescue of early 20th century Spanish art
Regarding the approach to Spanish art, in parallel with the exhibition of Néstor Martín-Fernández de la Torre (May 7, 2025), a forgotten but essential artist from the turn of the century, two group exhibitions will be organized: Grotesque. Popular Art and Aesthetic Revolution (October 9, 2024) and In the displaced air (November 6, 2024).
Grotesque is a reflection on this term as a critical tool of the reality of the 20th century. It will include paintings and audiovisual works, with a historical framework that extends from the beginning of the 19th century to modernity. It will feature Spanish authors such as Eugenio Lucas and other international symbols such as José Clemente Orozco, who will be one of the important loans promised by the museum. “We are going to insist on this critical moment of the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, because it is a period on which neither the Prado nor the Reina Sofía have fully worked.”
While in In the displaced airwhose title is inspired by a verse by García Lorca, pieces ranging from Goya to other contemporary works of art will be brought together to explore the potentially transformative dimension of art. The season concludes with a retrospective of Guatemalan Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, who interweaves sculptural objects and shows, inspired by the tradition of indigenous peoples of Latin America and political activism in Guatemala.
Rooms listed chronologically
The other big announcement this Tuesday was the new distribution and use of spaces in the Sabatini and Nouvel buildings, previously announced by Segade but detailed for the first time. “We want to avoid this labyrinthine condition of the museum. What we are doing is that the three upper floors of the Sabatini are dedicated to the permanent exhibition, and the ground floors and basements are dedicated to temporary exhibitions. All this so that you can cross the building from any of its entrances and not leave the elevator with the feeling of being in the middle of something without knowing what it is.
The first change in this redevelopment will be visible in March next year, when the fourth floor will be furnished with works from the 1980s to the present day. In 2026, the third floor will be furnished with pieces from the 1940s to the 1970s, and in 2028, works from the late 19th century will be hung on the second floor.
Architectural improvements will also be made to the three headquarters of Reina Sofía: the Central, the Velázquez Palace and the Crystal Palace, with interventions on the façade, in the case of the first. In total, around 10.5 million euros will be invested. Likewise, a change has been announced in the organization chart that abandons the old vertical structure to propose a horizontal structure with new management positions.
This is the first project presented by Manuel Segade since he took office, after Manuel Borja-Villel left his position after 15 years. The 46-year-old from A Coruña had just directed the Dos de Mayo Art Center for more than 10 years. As one of his main objectives, he set out to show more of the collection of 25,000 pieces, of which, according to her, only 5% are exhibited.
