“More work and less corruption”, “We are not against the system, the system is against us,” reads some of the posters that fill the entire wall of a room. They come from Madrid's Puerta del Sol, where the major protest movement formed on May 15, 2011. Back then, the “indignant” pitched their tents on the square in the center of the city after the real estate bubble had burst and the country had plunged into economic abyss. "15M", the Spanish abbreviation for this day, occupies a prominent place in the completely renovated Reina Sofía Museum. There was an upheaval in the permanent exhibition. The building, which opened in 1990 as a national museum, has only not changed on the outside. Inside, nothing has remained where and how it was.Only Picasso's “Guernica” still hangs in its old place on the second floor of the former hospital.

Hans-Christian Roessler

Political correspondent for the Iberian Peninsula and the Maghreb based in Madrid.

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The crises of modern times form the new axes in the permanent collection, which is not lacking in references to the present, such as the coronavirus, which did not provoke the first global pandemic: two halls show how artists reacted to HIV / AIDS, to fake news and in the eighties showed solidarity especially with the gay minority, which was discriminated against even more. There are voices from Spain, but also from Cuba. It is precisely this view from Latin America of global events that enriches the new exhibition very much. Your title “communicating vessels” expresses this claim. The museum is breaking out of old paths and disciplines. "Vasos Comunicantes. Colección 1881 - 2021 "is nothing less than a" complete reorganization ", says the director Manuel Borja-Villel. Architecture,Urban planning and theater are now also part of it. Most of it is new because the previous permanent exhibition ended in the 1980s.

A Mediterranean Manhattan

Around seventy percent of the more than 2,000 works have never been exhibited or were only recently acquired.

Offices, depots and workshops were transformed into new showrooms.

The closure during the corona lockdown made the transformation easier.

The collection now extends over 15,000 square meters over several floors of the two buildings.

“This is not a pantheon of famous men and women, but a travel route on which artists can appear anywhere,” says Borja-Villel.

It is a change for the visitors.

As before, they crowd in front of “Guernica”, the electricity from the entrance to the hall rarely cuts off.

The well-known works by Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies have remained, of course, but are no longer so easy to find.

This lavishly illustrated tour de force through recent history from a Hispanic-Latin American perspective cannot be tackled in a single visit. This perspective is attractive, but it also demands a lot from the visitors. Because without the historical context, many works of art do not open up by themselves. It starts with the Spanish preference for abbreviations such as 15M and continues with the indigenous uprisings. "The crisis, a fundamental element and not just a temporary one, as we are led to believe," says Borja-Villel about one of the most important aspects of the collection. In 2011, vacancies were not only filled in Spain, the “Arab Spring” also began. The range of the causes and consequences presented is sometimes almost too wide.On the Iberian Peninsula, it was the construction boom in particular that turned the small fishing town of Benidorm into a Mediterranean Manhattan and caused Valencia to sink into a swamp of corruption - and the evictions and the “okupas”, the squatters. Other works deal with sexual identity, environmental degradation and migration. Some of them were only created a few years ago.

Post-punk and Brazilian porn art

One focus is the long shadow of the past that exile and colonialism cast into the present. Pablo Picasso never returned from neighboring France, and many other Spanish artists fled to the former colonies. But even in democratic Spain, the colonial gaze persisted for a long time. The 1992 Expo in Seville uncritically celebrated the discovery of Latin America - another theme in the museum. In the meantime, the exchange with Latin American artists plays an increasingly important role, who are naturally interested in the upheavals in their own countries and their own cultures. For the Maya and audiovisual experiments, social engagement in Argentina and the resistance during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Several halls showthat the Reina Sofía is one of the most important museums for modern Ibero-American art.

However, the starting point of the exhibition lies on the Old Continent and begins much earlier: with the bohemians in Madrid, Paris and Barcelona and the role of the city at the end of the century before last.

Cubism is just as much a part of it as surrealism, folk culture, revolutions - and their defeats, as in the Spanish civil war, as well as post-punk and Brazilian porn art.

However, the circular route ends surprisingly quietly with a homage to the Andalusian landscape painter and sculptor Carmen Laffón.

She died a few weeks ago at the age of 87.

With her pictures from the white salt fields of Sanlúcar de Barrameda she shaped Spanish realism.

She had worked on the eight painted plaster bas-reliefs entitled Salt until shortly before her death.