MUSEO REINA SOFÍA
MNCARS
The collection of the Museo Reina Sofía is to be substantially enriched thanks to an important recent donation by the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) comprising thirty-nine works by twelve Latin American artists from a timeband stretching from the sixties to the present day. This donation to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía forms part of a global initiative involving six institutions with which the CPPC shares a long relationship and a common mission of stimulating greater knowledge of the art of Latin America in a global context. The works making up the donation have been selected in collaboration with each museum in accordance with its particular characteristics. The other five institutions are the Museo de Arte, Lima (MALI), the Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires (MAMBA), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin, and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York.
With the inclusion of young artists like Osías Yanov, Mathias Duville and Federico Herrero, the donation made to the Museo Reina Sofía consolidates the museum’s recently initiated project to focus on the contemporary as a fertile field for reflection on the intersection of artistic practices, and on the production of narratives for the current moment. At the same time, artists of an earlier generation, like Claudio Perna, Luis Fernando Benedit and Waltércio Caldas, allow us to trace new connections among the various conceptualisms in the region.
The set of major works to be received from the CPPC, which have been selected in collaboration with the Reina Sofía, open new roads for the museum to explore how the field of Latin American artistic production has been established as a space for social intepellation and historical reflection over the last fifty years. Their inclusion in the collection of the Reina Sofía will enrich the museum’s principal avenues of research. When seen in this light, this important donation reinforces the map of artistic practices that have marked – and continue to mark – Latin American art.
Although it is more and more difficult in a globalized present, where a type of nomadic artist is becoming the norm, to find artists working from a singular gaze, the twelve names included in the donation make up a unified group despite their generational and geographical diversity (they come from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Spain and Venezuela). All of them share a certain decentered gaze on the predominant narrative of art history, and many manage to adopt positions on particular realities at different historical moments, among which we can trace narratives common to proposals for new artistic languages.
“Through its programs, alliances and exhibitions, the Reina Sofía has become a protagonist in the articulation and preservation of the history of the culture of the Global South”, says Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.
The Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.
The Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) was founded in the 1970s by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and Gustavo A. Cisneros, and is one of the principal cultural and educational initiatives of the Fundación Cisneros. Their daughter, Adriana Cisneros de Griffin, is the President of the Fundación Cisneros, and Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro is the Director and Chief Curator of the CPPC. Based in Caracas and New York, the mission of the CPPC is to promote a greater appreciation of the diversity, sophistication and variety of Latin American art, and to foster its study. The CPPC pursues these aims through the preservation, presentation and study of the material culture of Latin America, from the ethnographic to the contemporary. The activities of the CPPC include exhibitions, public programs, publications, scholarships for academic research, and artistic production. (www.coleccioncisneros.org) was created to offer a platform for debate on the contributions of Latin America to the world of art and culture. Its inspiration and departure point is the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, but its objective is discovery, and its mission is to construct a multilingual virtual network of people and ideas.
Latin American Art as a force for social interpellation and historical reflection
The set of works making up the CPPC donation opens up new paths for exploring how Latin American art has activated a multitude of media for technical reproduction and various strategies for creative expression in order to establish the Latin American artistic production of the last fifty years as a space for social interpellation and historical reflection. This can be appreciated through a brief survey of the works that have been donated.
Feliciano Centurión (San Ignacio, Paraguay 1962 – Buenos Aires, Argentina 1996) works with elements belonging to the realm of intimate domesticity, linking him with other artists represented in the museum’s collection such as Sergio Zevallos and Yeguas del Apocalipsis. Similar in approach is the work of Fernanda Laguna (Buenos Aires, 1972), eight of whose pieces are included in the donation. She has established herself not only as an artist but also as a poet, gallerist, publisher and writer, contributing a gaze that traverses many of the recurrent themes of the feminine imagination, including erotic desire, the ludic, irrationality, queer expression and a non-pamphleteering concern for the social. Gender identity is also questioned, and the body posited as a space for transformation and a catalyst of change, by Osías Yanov (Argentina, 1980), who alternates sculpture, dance, video and performance.
Federico Herrero (San José, Costa Rica 1978) is one of the most important figures in contemporary Latin American art, and the four works included in this donation, all from the series entitled Catarata (‘Cataract’, 2011), free themselves from the picture plane in order to inhabit it bodily.
The works of Jac Leirner (Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1961) have to do both with the history of Brazilian Constructivism and with the legacy of Arte Povera and Minimalism. The work included in this donation, To and From (MoMA, Oxford) (1981), creates a new narrative through a collection of the most mundane material.
The Museum of Modern Art announces that it has received a major gift of 90 works of contemporary art from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, significantly enhancing the Museum’s holdings of contemporary works by Latin American artists. Together with the establishment of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America in 2016 and the more than 140 works by Latin American artists previously given to MoMA by Patricia and Gustavo Cisneros and the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, the new gift reinforces the longstanding relationship between the Museum and the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and advances MoMA’s commitment to exploring and fostering Latin American art and artists.
The gift includes works by 48 artists representing 10 Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In addition to works by major artists already represented in MoMA’s collection, including Luis Camnitzer, Gabriel Kuri, David Lamelas, Jac Leirner, José Leonilson, Cildo Meireles, and Miguel Rio Branco, 24 artists have entered into MoMA’s collection for the first time, including Feliza Bursztyn, Alejandro Cesarco, Eugenio Espinoza, Regina José Galindo, Mario García Torres, Cinthia Marcelle, Claudio Perna, Amalia Pica, Wilfredo Prieto, Mauro Restiffe, José Alejandro Restrepo, Yeni & Nan, and David Zink Yi. Two significant works addressing Latin American histories and concerns, one by the German artist Lothar Baumgarten and one from New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson, are also included in the gift.
While the core modern gift donated last year is renowned for its focus on geometric abstraction, this contemporary gift reflects a more recent shift by Latin American artists toward video, performance, photography, and more participatory forms of art. These new additions to the collection establish an important dialogue between an emerging generation of artists and the Museum’s outstanding holdings of Latin American works in photography, media and performance, and Conceptual art from the 1960s and 1970s.
A digital exhibition that presents a selection of the extraordinary artworks that have been given by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, animated by the reflections of 16 MoMA curators can be found at: mo.ma/cisneros
