New collection. Communicating vessels. 1881-2021

On 27 November 2021, the Reina Sofia Museum presented the global reorganisation of its Collection, which includes a selection of around 2,000 pieces of art on display in various spaces within the Sabatini and Nouvel buildings.

After many years of research, the Reina Sofía Museum has reorganised its Permanent Collection in collaboration with almost all its departments, with hundreds of new pieces thanks to donations, long-term loans and new acquisitions.

This overhaul invites us to completely rethink the entire Collection, which includes contemporary art from the eighties to the present day. The Museum has reorganised its permanent collection with the aim of offering narratives and experiences that speak to the present moment through a critical study of our common past, without claiming to be comprehensive or categorical. What takes precedence in this new arrangement is not the chronological order of events and works, but the relationships and genealogies that we can peel back or trace from our standpoint in the present.

In this vein, the Museum has created eight thematic episodes, open to flexible temporalities and interdisciplinary perspectives, which combine to tell new stories:

1. Avant-Garde Territories: City, Architecture and Magazines (Sabatini Building, Floor 2)
2. The Lost Thought (Sabatini Building, Floor 4)
3. Enclosed Field (Sabatini Building, Floor 4)
4. Double Exhibition: Art and the Cold War (Sabatini Building, Floor 4)
5. Enemies of Poetry: Resistance in Latin America (Sabatini Building, Floor 1)
6. A Drunken Boat: Eclecticism, Institutionalism and Disobedience in the ’80s (Sabatini Building, Floor 0)
7. Apparatus 92: Can History Be Rewound? (Sabatini Building, Floor 0)
8. Exodus and Communal Life (Sabatini Building, Floor 1)

Image Credits:

• Diego Rivera. Les vases communicants (The Communicating Vessels). Long-term loan of Fundación Museo Reina Sofía, 2020 (Donated by Vicente Quilis Moscardó) © [2021] Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Khalo Museums Trust. México D.F. [VEGAP]
• Room 103.09. Marcel Dzama y Raymond Pettibon. The Great Wave
• Room 103.19. Unfinished Timelines
• Room 002.01. Apparatus 92. Can History Be Rewound?
• Die Teilung der Erde. Tableaux zu rechtlichen Synopsen der Berliner Afrika Konferenz (The Division of the Earth. Tableaux on the Legal Synopses of the Berlin Africa Conference)
• Maruja Mallo. Ether Travellers, 1982. © Maruja Mallo, VEGAP, Madrid, 2021