Exhibition. George Herriman. Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat

George Herriman, Krazy Kat. N.d.. Ink, pencil and watercolor on paper. 34,3 x 36,8 cm. Garry Trudeau Collection. © King Features Syndicate, Inc. ™ Hearst Holdings, inc., King Features Syndicate Division

George Herriman (New Orleans, 1880 – Los Angeles, 1944), regarded as one of the foremost American cartoonists, was part of a generation of pioneering artists who developed their work in the newspapers that started to feature comic strips at the turn of the twentieth century. Herriman’s work was hugely influential among a broad array of artists, including Willem de Kooning and Öyvind Fahlström, as well as intellectuals and writers such as E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot and Jack Kerouac.    

The work of Herriman came into being alongside the progress of the comic as a new artistic language surfacing in the USA at the tail end of the nineteenth century. This new medium brought with it a series of visual discoveries based on the repetition of drawings and patterns which, at this early stage, denoted a major narrative accomplishment.

Dates: From October 18, 2017 to February 26, 2018
Location: Sabatini Building. Floor 3
Organized by: Museo Reina Sofía
Curated by: Rafael García and Brian Walker
Related activity: lecture by Art Spielgelman

Exhibition. Esther Ferrer. All Variations Are Valid, Including this One

Esther Ferrer, El arte de la performance: teoría y práctica (1) y (2), Bone - Festival für Aktionskunst, Schlachthaus Theater, Berna, 1998. Foto: David Aebi. © Esther Ferrer, VEGAP, Madrid, 2017

Esther Ferrer (San Sebastián, 1937), a pioneer and one of the foremost representatives of performance art in Spain, began participating in the activities of the Zaj group — with Walter Marchetti, Ramon Barce and Juan Hidalgo — in 1967. From that point on, she brought action art to the fore in her artistic practice, although from 1970 she did return to visual art by way of reworked photographs, installations, pictures based on the series of prime numbers or Pi, objects, and so on. These pieces most notably include the series Autorretratos (Self-Portraits), in progress since 1981, Números primos (Prime Numbers), carried out with different spatial-temporary formats, and Juguetes educativos (Educational Toys), from the 1980s, her work adhering to the Minimalist and Conceptual Art initiated in the 1960s, with Stéphane Mallarmé, Georges Perec, John Cage and Fluxus the points of reference, along with aspects of feminism from the time.

Dates: From October 26, 2017 to February 25, 2018
Location: Parque del Retiro, Palacio de Velázquez
Organized by: Museo Reina Sofía
Curated by: Mar Villaespesa and Laurence Rassel

Master lecture. Nelly Richard

CADA, No+, 1983-1989

The Museo Reina Sofía master lectures, which mark the start of the Study Centre’s academic activity every year, set out to explore the different approaches and methodologies which have stretched art history in recent times. These lectures, which came into being in 2010, have been conducted by eminent art historians and theorists such as Linda Nochlin, T. J. Clark, Hans Belting, Simón Marchán and Benjamin Buchloh. For this course the guest lecturer will be the essayist, art critic, cultural theorist, activist and Chile-based curator Nelly Richard (1948). Richard’s theoretical work is conspicuous for crossing over debates on identity and gender with a critique of the production of meaning stemming from French post-structuralist thought. Her noteworthy publications include Arte en Chile desde 1973: escena de avanzada y sociedad (1987), Chile, arte actual (1988), Textos estratégicos (2000) and Feminismo, género y diferencia(s) (2008).

Dates: October 19 and 20, 2017
Organized by: Museo Reina Sofía
Full programme here

Film series. The Eye in Matter. Dziga Vertov and Early Soviet Cinema

Dziga Vertov, Chelovek s kinoapparatom, 1929

Part retrospective and part recontextualization, this series presents a number of Vertov’s feature films and selections from his early chronicles, together with little-known Kulturfilme by famous masters like Kuleshov and Pudovkin; with works of contemporaneous non-fiction film-makers such as Esfir Shub and Mikhail Kaufman; with experimental European films that impacted Vertov and that he himself influenced; and with a number of now-forgotten documentaries by Vladimir Erofeev, Roman Karmen, and Vitalii Zhemchuzhnyi, among others, which question the theories set out by the director of Man with a Movie Camera (1929) on filming reality. These films show that, from its inception a century ago, Soviet documentary has been the site of struggle between two competing epistemologies of reality that continue their contest today: on the one hand, the skeptical positivism of intransigent facts and, on the other, the logical objectivism of abstract concepts. Throughout almost thirty sessions, this film series establishes a panoramic approximation to the period through both.

Dates: From October 3 to November 23, 2017
Location and hours: see the full programme.
Organized by: Museo Reina Sofía
In collaboration with: Filmoteca Española