This exhibition, the third project that aims to exhibit the Collection at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía under artists and themes, highlights the fact that one of the defining features of Spanish artistic production during the Eighties and Nineties is plurality. In addition, the artists’ works and careers that are represented reveal the gradual integration and participation of them into international artistic and aesthetic debates. The exhibition is restricted to two areas of domestic production: painting and sculpture, as well as considering the shift from this to installation art.
The presence of Esteban Vicente, Eduardo Arroyo, Pablo Palazuelo and Luis Gordillo serves to illustrate the current situation of a long career that has existed on aesthetic fields and pictorial grammars that are very different. That very same variety is seen in the range afforded by Alfonso Galván and Hernández Pijuan, or Jaime Burguillos and Ferrán García Sevilla. The new pictorial languages, lyrical in many of the cases found in this selection, are mainly examples of alternative proposals to figuration and are a stated willingness to colour (signalling the end of a long period of post-war and informalist inherentance of art); they are represented in the work of José María Sicilia, José Manuel Broto, Darío Urzay, Juan Uslé, Juan Ugalde, Miquel Barceló and Juan Navarro Baldeweg.
Regarding sculpture, we see the continuation of an analytical path interested in geometric-spatial issues (Sergi Aguilar) and constructive issues (Begoña Goyenetxea); although a more experimental environment is formed from installation and the interaction of planes (Txomin Badiola, Peio Irazu). Generally, Spanish sculptors widely reject the notion of monuments (an infinite piece, a pedestal) in favour of staging and the subversion of the limit idea, giving space a key role in physical and material interaction and development (Cristina Iglesias, Juan Muñoz, José Herrera, Susana Solano). This sculptural practice calls for a renewed role of the spectator, making them an integral part of the stage. The same active attitude is required of the installations (Manuel Sáez, Federico Guzmán), where artistic manipulation of everyday objects face the public in a world of materials that confer new meanings.
