The Reina Sofía Museum is hosting an exhibition that puts forward a journey through the Susana and Ricardo Steinbruch Collection from 10 November to 2 October on the First Floor of the Nouvel Building. The selection, which  consists of more than one hundred works on display for the first time, brings together different temporalities and geographies centred, first and foremost, on Latin American contemporaneity, particularly Brazilian, and the artistic practices that transpired in Eastern and Central Europe across the second half of the twentieth century.

The exhibition is curated by Manuel Borja-Villel, with the collaboration of Beatriz Martínez Hijazo, and proposes a journey that begins with a specific project by Fernanda Gomes (Brazil, 1960) and moves through anti-art movements in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Neo-concretism or the artistic responses that sparked political events in the 1960s and 1970s.

A section is devoted to Mira Schendel (Switzerland 1919-Brazil 1988) with a set of works  that contemplates almost all of the artist’s career. The artist, Leonilson (Brazil 1957-1993) is also represented, whereby it is the first time that such a large set of works by the Brazilian artist has been exhibited in Spain.  The piece by Jonathas de Andrade (Brazil 1982), artist at the Brazil Pavilion in this year’s Venice Biennial, can also be highlighted.

The pieces selected pivot around the theory of gestures, coined by the Czech-Brazilian thinker, Vilém Flusser. For him, these rituals of perception not only make our own aesthetic and affective recognition possible, but also underpin a cartography of relations and crossovers that join seemingly disparate artists.

Image Credits:

• View of the exhibition. An Act of Seeing that Unfolds
• View of the Fernanda Gomes Exhibition, São Paulo National Gallery, Brazil, 2019- 2020. Photo: Pat Kilgore. Courtesy of the artist and the Luisa Strina Gallery
• Edward Krasiński, Intervention, 1975. View of Hall 001.09, Communicating Vessels. Collection 1881-2021. Episode 6, Reina Sofía Museum, 2021
• José Leonilson, So Many are the Truths, 1988. Photo: Edouard Fraipont, 2020 © Leonilson Project  Society of Friends
• Mira Schendel, Untitled (Sim), 1960s. Photo: Eduardo Ortega