International Museum Day 2023

The Susana and Ricardo Steinbruch Collection is a major repertory of different temporalities and geographies centred, first and foremost, on Latin American contemporaneity — particularly Brazilian — and the artistic practices that transpired in Eastern Europe across the second half of the twentieth century. The pieces selected for the show pivot around the theory of gestures coined by Czech-Brazilian thinker Vilém Flusser. Therefore, a dialogical and non-linear survey is laid out, starting from a site-specific project by Fernanda Gomes and moving through anti-art movements in the former Yugoslavia, Neo-concretism and artistic responses that sparked political events in the 1960s and 1970s in the contexts mentioned.

The Museo Reina Sofía Collection aims to offer narratives and experiences which, without seeking to be exhaustive or categorical, speak of the present time through a critical study of the common past. What takes precedence is not the chronological succession of events and works, but rather the relationships and genealogies that we can weave and disclose from the present. In this instance, visitors can survey the following Episodes: 1. Avant-garde territories: City, Architecture and Magazines;  3. Campo Cerrado; 4. Double Exhibition: Art and Cold War; and finally 6. A Drunken Boat: Eclecticism, Institutionalism and Disobedience in the 1980s. 

The first question that springs to visitors’ minds when they enter the Museo is: Where do I start? To answer this question and for first-time visitors to the Collection to get their bearings, this taster tour is made available, whereby the Mediation Team offers key routes and pointers to plan an independent visit. Being worded as such, as a question, is also an invitation for people to wander around the rooms.