So it was... Red Itiner 2022

This exhibition took us back to the decades before the Civil War to show us the project of social modernization that inspired the Institución Libre de Enseñanza (ILE) and its proposal for an education based on the liberation of the creative forces of each person.

The exhibition began with what defines the ILE project ("a modernising project") and the main elements of its new pedagogy. Firstly, play as the foundation of the construction of the self (and of the other), and the primary activity that shapes knowledge and relationships ("the game that creates us"). Next, it showed how one learns by doing and learns to do, turning the apprentice into a creator ("learning is creating"), and presented the arts as an irreplaceable vehicle for training ("the arts teach us"). Finally, the exhibition showed us how this idea of ​​education involves learning life in life and nature in nature, and culminates with the reflection that a successful education is one that leads to conceiving "life as a work of art". All these proposals, which are present in the modernisation project promoted by the ILE, establish a fruitful dialogue with our present.

Commissioners: Antonio Moreno and Carlos Wert

The exhibition project included an original story by Manuel Marsol made for his illustrated album "The Legend of Don Fermín" (Ediciones SM, 2018), whose content is based on the tradition of Spanish legends. The work was created after being awarded the International Illustration Prize at the Bologna Book Fair.

Behind Marsol's illustrations there is a meticulous intellectual and artistic work. Through them, the author proposes a journey to the past from the present, wrapped in his own atmosphere and iconography, with a multitude of artistic, literary, architectural and Spanish imaginary references.

Curatorship: We Art Exhibitions

Gerardo Vielba, Spanish photographer born in Madrid in 1921, was an essential creator in the development of photography in our country. Theoretician, scholar, defender and transmitter of the artistic photographic medium of his time, Vielba assumed the role of mentor to his colleagues in the group La Palangana, which would later lead to La Escuela de Madrid, and his enthusiasm also infected the young people with whom he was in the Royal Photographic Society (Madrid), in the halls of residence, in conferences, debates and competitions.

Through his photographic work, Gerardo Vielba produced ground-breaking and avant-garde work, bringing about a definitive change in the vision of photography that was held at the time. Due to his influence, photographers began to look at everyday reality and ordinary people, freeing themselves from the obligation to convey a message, from allegory, as well as from an overly rigid academicism.

From the beginning, the artist approached his work spontaneously photographing the experiences with his daughters: in a moment of change, he saw in them the vehicle to transmit the strength of the photographic medium, as well as the opportunity to be able to return to being a child and recover all his capacity for wonder. Through his images, Vielba allows us to attend to things that we normally do not pay attention to, things that require a time of introspection, things that we did not know about ourselves and that surprise us.

Commissario: Antonio Tabernero

the unspeakable It brought together visual and textual works from the collections of the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo of the Community of Madrid and the ARCO Foundation Collection. A sample of the broad conceptual, technical and formal diversity of international contemporary artistic practices from the 1990s to the present.

They all make up a body, sometimes literary and other times simply documentary, where image and text converge beyond the historical feedback between literature and image. While contemporary writing transgresses literature to reveal what cannot be said with words alone, the visual arts make use of writing, the written text, to find new creative possibilities and new languages ​​with which to say the unspeakable. The links between text and image, literature and visual culture, warn of the infinite possibilities that occur in contemporary creation when the different artistic disciplines are confused.

Here, the book, the literary text or the document were transformed into new artistic objects that address current issues of the historical reality of their artists, those derived from identity, deterritorialization or memory. Even the very definition of what art is enters into crisis when the confusion between the visual and the textual exceeds the limits between creative disciplines.

Curator: Emma Trinidad

Paco Rabal throws explosives at infected people riding the Jet Star roller coaster at the Madrid Amusement Park in "Invasion of the Atomic Zombies," while Paul Naschy, as the werewolf, fights a tiger at Chinchón Castle in "The Beast and the Magic Sword." Eduardo Noriega jumps from one of the towers on Madrid's Paseo de la Castellana in "Open Your Eyes," while "Supersonic Man," our national superhero, does the same from another building in the area.

Internationally, Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, and Christopher Lee, the great stars of fantasy, are filming in the Community of Madrid. Or John Milius with Arnold Schwarzenegger for "Conan the Barbarian," a blockbuster celebrating forty years since its release in 2022. And not to mention special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen and his Sinbad trilogy.

Following the Western boom, the need arose to offer new exportable genres to achieve affordable and highly profitable products, opting for fantasy and horror. This remained the case for decades. Filming took place largely in the current Community of Madrid, such as "Walpurgis Night" by León Klimovsky; "The Residence" by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador; "Panic on the Trans-Siberian Railway" by Eugenio Martín; and "Do Not Desecrate the Sleep of the Dead" by Jordi Grau.

Thus, until reaching the present, with a live genre, with recent titles such as Voices, by Ángel Gómez, shot in Torrelodones, or the feature film-anthology, Vampire Horror Tales, by Manuel M. Velasco, Isaac Berrocal, Piter Moreira, Erika Elizalde and Víctor Matellano, shot in Leganés, Navacerrada, Colmenar Viejo and Madrid. EITHER The grandmother, by Paco Plaza, shot in the capital.

Commissar: Victor Matellano

The work of Miguel Trillo, a portraitist and documentary photographer of urban tribes from the movida to the emergence of hip hop, is distinguished by his attention to the diversity of the protagonists in his environment.

On this occasion, "Pasarela Street (2012-2021)", his latest project carried out in the most important fashion weeks in the world –Madrid, Lisbon, London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, Seoul, Shanghai, Saigon, Cape Town or Casablanca–, presented us with the face of the so-called fashion victims, anonymous characters who curiously attend these events as if it were an imaginary movie.

A total of forty colour portraits made up this peculiar mosaic of spontaneous "extras", of young people eager to become, under the photographer's gaze, works of creation, with which the artist Miguel Trillo creates a revealing and sincere ode to tolerance and the integration of diversity, with the sole vocation of bringing photographic art and its capacity to document the transversality of contemporaneity closer to all audiences.

Curator: Monica Carabias Alvaro

Between 1920 and 1940 the advertising market was consolidated and found its main transmission channels through posters, the press and the radio. The poster, in addition to being recognized as an artistic expression, became the main advertising support directed towards the different sectors of the population. The posters were installed in the streets, on the facades and lampposts, and shared the stage with commercial signs that gave names to the businesses of the time and that allow, with their study, to know the feeling of a society. On many occasions we find that the main claim of these posters are women and that many of these business signs bear the name of a woman.  

The exhibition included posters from the Carlos Velasco collection and advertising signs from the Paco Graco collection, organised into three thematic sections that sought to analyse the different stereotypes in which the image of women is used for commercial and advertising purposes. Historical pieces of great artistic and aesthetic value, faithful to an era that we are trying to overcome, and which seek to make us reflect on whether the advertising we receive today continues to be sexist or discriminatory.

Commissioners: Angela Suau, Alberto Nanclares, Metzeri Sánchez and Jacobo Cayetano

The legendary magazine "La Luna de Madrid," one of the most influential cultural publications published in Spain, published the special issue that led to this exhibition in the late 1980s. "The 87 of '87 are largely new faces or, in other cases, lesser-known faces of well-known names. It's a commitment to renewal... those who will be."

Each face was accompanied by a literary brushstroke, completing, sometimes with his own words, others with the subjective reflections of the journalist. That number, involuntary pioneer of the current photobook, is a true flow of dreams, emotions, reflections, beauty and energy. This exhibition proposal is nourished by all this. Portraits of people from all walks of culture and society published three decades ago dialogue today with current photographs of the same protagonists, inviting us to share their evolution, concerns, achievements, dreams...

Visitors were able to see a series of photographs taken for this exhibition by photographers from different generations and schools, together with the original images taken from the peculiar special issue of La Luna de Madrid. The portraits were accompanied by new texts written based on the current reflections of the protagonists, offering a complete emotional journey through their faces and ideas.

Commissar: Felix Manuel Cabez

Amazed, astonished, surprised, dumb, bewildered, dumbfounded, dumbstruck, puzzled, perplexed, stunned, dumbstruck, stunned, stunned, stunned, stunned, open-mouthed, speechless, wordless.

Word, from the Latin parabŏla: linguistic unit, generally endowed with meaning, which is separated from the others by potential pauses in pronunciation and blanks in writing. 

Royal Spanish Academy: Dictionary of the Spanish language, 23rd ed.

The exhibition project Wordless, playing with the traps of language from its very title and definition, presented a juicy selection of thirteen renowned contemporary artists from the Spanish State who habitually use words and silence, physically or metaphorically speaking, to construct their works.

A selection of sixteen pieces and «voices», from various disciplines and indisciplines (visual poetry, action video, audio text, experimental editing, conceptual art, process art, sound installation, video, photography, sculpture, serigraphy, drawing...), from which a surprising and eccentric reading of current contemporary creation is constructed and recounted, leaving us for a moment wordless and immediately after overflowing with them.

artists: Alicia Martín · Ana García-Pineda · Antonio Gómez · Bartolomé Ferrando · Concha Jerez · Isabel León · Isidoro Valcárcel Medina · Isidro López-Aparicio (iLA) · Joana Brabo · Los Torreznos · Manuel Rufo · María Salgado and Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca · Oscar Moore.

Commissar: pepe bat

Picasso, Chagall, Dalí or Max Ernst dedicate part of their creation to the traditional connections between painting and words. Picasso told Françoise Gilot that painting "is poetry, written in verse with plastic rhymes."

The relationship between painting and words is at the root of our civilization. The exhibition reflects on this, promoting knowledge of key artists of the 20th century, while allowing the general public to access the work of other contemporary creators.

Picasso engraved with a burin the "Six Fantastic Tales" intended to accompany Toesca's stories; Chagall worked with the poet Senghor on several books; and Dalí, seeking to absorb pictorial and literary tradition, reinterpreted Ronsard's "The Loves of Cassandra." Jean Arp and Max Ernst, the driving forces behind Dadaism, are present in the exhibition, along with Jean Cocteau, a key figure in the avant-garde. The show also featured works by artists who orbited the uncertain circle of Breton, André Masson, and Wifredo Lam. In this context, the exhibition pays tribute to the great North American surrealist lithographer Federico Castellón, who was actually born in Spain; the graphic work of Angelina Beloff, known to the general public as the protagonist of the novel "Dear Diego, Quiela Embraces You"; and Gabriel Belot, who surprises with his approaches to surrealism and expressionism.

Commissar: Oscar Carrascosa