Marisa González

From 21 May to 22 September,  the Nouvel Building (Floor 1) at the Reina Sofía Museum will host an anthological exhibition of the multimedia artist, Marisa González, a key figure in the feminist movement, pioneer of electronic art and winner of the 2023 Velázquez Prize.

From the outset, Marisa González was interested in incorporating new technologies into her creative process. In the 1970s, she started using photocopiers, including the world's first colour photocopier, to produce some of her works, as highlighted by the jury of the prize awarded by the Ministry of Culture and Sport, the most important award in its category in Spain, comparable to the Cervantes Prize for Literature.

Shortly afterwards, the artist from Bilbao and pioneer of multimedia art also introduced the fax and, later, computers into her artistic work, at a time when access to personal computers in Spain was still very limited. In this context, the jury of the Velázquez Prize highlighted “her extensive career as a multimedia artist, one of the first to explore and use new technologies from the 1970s to date”.

One of the key moments that led to her getting involved in the use of emerging technologies was her participation in the Master’s Degree on generative systems taught by Sonia Sheridan in Chicago in 1981.

This exhibition spans the variety of media in Marisa González's practice, including hybridisations such as Musical Spellings (1989-1990) which translates contemporary scores into visual language, through painting and photocopying. Some of her other works are also reviewed, such as Daydream.  Scenes from Daily Life (1998) or the Luminaires from The Factory project (2000).

Image Credit:

Marisa González, The Wall, from the Nuclear Lemóniz series, 2003-2004. Artist’s Collection