On October 2, 2012, Her Majesty Queen Sofia of Spain attended the opening of the new exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía entitled, Encuentros con los años 30.

“Encuentros con los años 30 addresses this decade of the twentieth century as a turbulent period in which art and power allied and confronted and, on many levels, is key to understanding our own present.

The exhibition presents the artistic production of this period, which was marked both by a growing climate of political violence as the occurrence of major technological innovations, especially in the field of communication and transport, should not only be seen as an extension inertia of the vanguards of the previous two decades and/or relationship, particularly contentious, with propagandistic narratives, but also a time when being questioned and reformulated in which modernity began to generate ideas and objects that challenged the boundaries between disciplines, media and nations.

Addressing the notion of encounter from a thematic perspective, the exhibition examines the role of artistic creation in the thirties played the symbolic and geographical displacement, voluntarily or forced, made the artists of the time. Trying to show how from such movements began to rethink the principles inherited from the avant-garde aesthetic and discursive and narrative strategies that have lasted until today. In turn, the exhibition offers a critical reflection on the use of these artists made the mass media and explores the tensions and relationships they had with the contexts-political, cultural, institutional, in which they worked.

Encuentros con los años 30 is structured in six sections: realism, abstraction international exhibitions surrealism photography, cinema and posters Spain: Second Republic and Civil War exile. And while addressing the influence of the political situation or avoid rivalries that arose between (and within) the major “isms” art of the time, priority is given to the connections between artists and moments of fracture and stylistic eclecticism, highlighting the diversity, complexity and daring art that was made in that decade.”

A clip about the exhibition.