Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain.

I have never been a huge fan of contemporary art, but Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía completely changed this sentiment. This museum is also one of the main reasons I would like to eventually return to Madrid.


The experience began in their glass-walled and -floored elevators, whose intention, I am sure, is to give the rider vertigo.

With my nerves on edge, I made my way to the nearest exhibit, which led into a room embellished with typical Picasso paintings -- work akin to the those exposed at the Met and MoMA. I perused through this room rather quickly in anticipation to get to the Guernica (1937, oil on canvas). I suppose my mind has never been good at translating the dimensions of an artwork provided to me in the captions found in textbooks because I was floored by the enormity of this painting (11' x 25'6"), which, rightfully so, has its own room in Reina Sofia.

(image borrowed from go see run eat)

I stood in front of the painting for a good fifteen minutes. There were maybe twenty or so other people in the room with me -- but no one spoke, the room stood still the entire time while everyone just took the artwork in.


Other noteworthy works at Reina Sofia included:

Luis Quintanilla, Franco's Black Spain Series,1938-9, ink on paper.

more of his drawings (with explanations) from this series.

Francisco Goya, Disasters of War Etchings Series, 1810-20, ink on paper.

Francis Picabia, Woman in Red Headscarf, 1937, oil on canvas.

This isn't the greatest image of this artwork, but when seen in person, its colors are more vibrant, really drawing the viewer in. 
 

Francis Picabia, Brouette (Wheelbarrow), 1922, gouache. 

The Dada room mostly consisted of work by Picabia -- his watercolors, sketches, and music (mutable sounds).

Salvador Dali, The Great Masturbator, 1929, oil on canvas.

Information borrowed from the Dali Gallery: 

The Great Masturbator is a self-portrait painted in July 1929. Dalí's head has the shape of a rock formation near his home and is seen in this form in several paintings dating from 1929. The painting deals with Dalí's fear and loathing of sex. He blamed his negative feelings toward sex as partly a result of reading his father's, extremely graphic book on venereal diseases as a young boy. The head is painted "soft", as if malleable to the touch; it looks fatigued, sexually spent: the eyes are closed, the cheeks flushed. Under the nose a grasshopper clings, its abdomen covered with ants that crawl onto the face where a mouth should be. From early childhood, Dalí had a phobia of grasshoppers and the appearance of one here suggests his feelings of hysterical fear and a loss of voice or control. Emerging from the right of the head, a woman moves her mouth toward a man's crotch. The man's legs are cut and bleeding, implying a fear of castration. The woman's face is cracked, as though the image that Dalí's head produces will soon disintegrate. To reiterate the sexual theme, the stamen of a lily and tongue of a lion appear underneath the couple.  

Salvador Dali, Cenicitas (Little Ashes) formerly Sterile Efforts, 1927-8, oil on wood.

Information borrowed from the Dali Gallery:

Senicitas, (also known as Summer Forces or The Birth of Venus), was painted when Dalí was completing his military service. It is one of a series of paintings that mark the emergence of themes and symbols that were to dominate Dalí's work. Senicitas is Spanish for "little cinders", referring to the red marks that are attacking the limbless body. The body, though it is more male than female, has no genitals but to the right of it a hand forms the shape of male genitalia. There are also several headless female bodies; one covered in dark veins squeezes her lactating breast. Dalí uses various techniques of depiction here: some images are painted quite realistically, like the female body in the bottom middle of the painting, while others like the donkey above, appear as a scattered outline only. The decapitated head of Dalí's friend Lorca appears as if dead, lying on the ground underneath the body. One of their favorite games was for Lorca to pretend he was dead; he could do this quite convincingly for long periods of time.

Joan Miró, Man with Pipe, 1925, oil on canvas

This was located in a room called Palabras en libertad. Surrealismo  y campos magnéticos (Words in Freedom. Surrealism and Magnetic Fields), which I thought was a beautiful name.

Angeles Santos Torroella, Un Mundo (A World), 1929, oil on canvas.

This artist was only 17 years old when she produced this. I can't find the
dimensions of this work, but it's very large (~6'x4') and beautifully detailed.

 Robert Delaunay, Portrait of Tristan Tzara, 1923, oil on canvas.

Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa, Retrato de Sonia Klamery, c. 1913, oil on canvas.

 

Yayoi Kusama Exhibit Entrance

This little girl ran towards the balloon as I snapped the picture. 
Her excitement and animation for Kusama's art made me smile.  

Yayoi Kusama, Gleaming Lights of the Souls, 2011, installation.

Literally one of the most amazing experiences of my life. You enter a small room

that is mirrored on all four sides, and hung from the ceiling are a constellation of LED 

lights that flicker from green to red to yellow, producing a series of reflections.

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Nets Painting, 1959, oil on canvas.

From Reina Sofia pamphlet on Kusama:

In 1957, Kusama arrived in Seattle, where she exhibited her work at the Zoe Dusanne Gallery. Six months later she moved to New York, where she radically transformed her approach to painting. Possibly a response to Abstract Expressionism, the large scale canvases that became known as the Infinity Net Paintings are covered in seemingly endlessly repeated, scalloped brushstrokes of a single color on a contrasting background. The Infinity Nets openly display the process of their making. The nets are made of repeated versions of a single, simple gesture: a discrete movement of the artist's wrist, conveyed via her brush as an arc of paint. The incessant character of this gesture is both obsessive and meditative and could be said to anticipate the serial techniques employed by Minimal and Conceptual artists. The nets and 'dots' visible between the painted arcs were to become key motifs in Kusama's personal vocabulary of images to which she has returned through her subsequent career.