Lucian Freud, Leonora Carrington, Juan Munoz. Three giants of 20th century art are opening an exhibition in Madrid these days, in some cases with exceptional samples: it is the first Carrington retrospective in Spain, where he lived two brutal experiences that marked his life, a group rape and a horror movie psychiatric hospital , which she knew how to turn around to empower herself. And they are not the only great creators who land these days in the capital of Spain, where many bets are released coinciding with the contemporary art fair Arco, which turns Madrid into a super museum.
A supermuseum in which the main poster is disputed by the carnal realism of Lucian Freud, grandson of the father of psychoanalysis, and the dreamlike surrealism of Carrington, a journey through the interior landscapes of the psyche. Lucian Freud. Until June 18, Nuevas perspectivas, organized together with the National Gallery in London, brings together fifty paintings by the British painter at the Thyssen Museum, who at times was mostly known for his stormy relationships – in the exhibition one painting shows a stark rupture–, but from whom the power of his painting is claimed, in which, portraying a couple in a bed or a dog sleeping next to a woman, he captures the nature of relationships through a hand on a leg or the snout of the animal on the arm of its mistress. “I want the paint to act as if it were meat,” he stressed.
For its part, the Mapfre Foundation exhibits in Revelation an impressive retrospective –188 pieces– of the British Leonora Carrington, who ended up in Mexico after passing through France –where she marched with the surrealist Max Ernst– and Spain, where she suffered a group rape of requetés and an internment in a terrible mental hospital in Santander. She suffered uprooting, sexual violence and mental illness and she knew how to make all of it material for her work, even transforming the monstrous minotaur into a woman. Feminism, ecology and inequality are reflected in a world full of chimerical beings and female deities.
The Sala Alcalá 31 of the Community of Madrid meets until June 11 in Juan Muñoz. All I see will survive me some of the most iconic pieces of the sculptor during the nineties, and will continue at the CA2M Museum in June, which will show the eighties work of the creator who died in 2001 after exhibiting in the Turbine Room of the Tate Modern. The exhibition, curated by Manuel Segade, emphasizes Muñoz's theatricality among mysterious goofballs, dwarf characters who look in the mirror or the 27 Asian grays in the installation Plaza (1996), who socialize with a laugh whose origin escapes the viewer .
The ICO Museum shows Pablo Palazuelo. The line as a dream of architecture, works that make visible the closeness to architecture of his geometric research. And La Casa Encendida shows the powerful and vindictive painting by the Brazilian Maxwell Alexandre, which places black characters in the white temples of contemporary art in Nuevo poder. passability Another Brazilian, Lucas Arruda, shows in the Ateneo library, through the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, his evocative and mysterious tropical forests in Assum Preto.
In Preservation Paradox, Matadero brings together three films by Berlin-based Palestinian Jumana Manna, who delves into the paradoxes caused by the action of preserving in the fields of music, agriculture and law; the Thyssen exhibits the installation that the American Wu Tsang brought to the last Venice Biennale, Of Whales, which starts from Herman Melville's Moby Dick to create an immersive installation that shows a psychedelic ocean environment; and the Blanquerna Cultural Center of the Generalitat vindicates Isidre Manils with Not a fair image, but precisely an image. For the more classic, the Royal Palace offers Sorolla through light, with 24 paintings by the creator and virtual reality rooms.
