BERLIN.- From October 5, 2022, to February 27, 2023, the PalaisPopulaire, in cooperation with the Museo Helga de Alvear and the Embassy of Spain, presents the exhibition ESCRIBIR TODOS SUS NOMBRES.

Curated by Lola Hinojosa Martínez, Head of Performing Arts and Intermedia Collection at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the exhibition showcases a Spanish female avant-garde from 1960 to the present day that is still little known in Germany. The works presented are at the interface between art, language, writing, and abstraction.

At the same time, the show highlights the cultural connection between Germany and Spain. ESCRIBIR TODOS SUS NOMBRES honors a woman who has played an essential role in the field of art for this exchange in recent decades: Helga de Alvear, one of Spain’s most renowned gallery owners. All the works in the show come from her collection and will be presented afterwards in the new extension of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Helga de Alvear in Cáceres. Alvear was born in Germany and began collecting art in the 1960s. In 1995, she opened her own gallery in Madrid, focusing on photography, video, and installation art, which has had a significant impact on discourses on international contemporary art.

She has also pioneered the collection of women artists represented in this exhibition. Since the 1960s, when the collection was launched, Spain’s political, social, and cultural reality has undergone fundamental changes. The end of the forty-year military dictatorship in 1975, the transition to democracy, and the country’s accession to the European Union were accompanied by a social upheaval in which young people, and women in particular, took the leading role in transforming Spain’s new society.

ESCRIBIR TODOS SUS NOMBRES reflects this: the exhibition presents several generations of Spanish women artists who, from the postwar period to the present day, have explored abstraction, seriality, scores, language, writing, and performance in different ways.

In the first part of the exhibition, Elena Asins and Esther Ferrer, whose artistic beginnings date back to the 1960s, show how they implement themes of linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, and music in their works. The intertwined knots in the textile sculptures of Aurèlia Muñoz and the playful surrealistic works of Eva Lootz can be viewed as unusual forms of “inscription.” Artists such as Vera Chaves Barcellos, Sarah Grilo, and Soledad Sevilla take us to another place: the street. In their work, public space becomes a setting for urban and social critique or even literary narratives.




In the second part of the show, Cristina Iglesias, Susana Solano, and Carmen Laffón poetically address people’s relationship with nature, with threatened and disappearing landscapes. Erlea Maneros Zabala and Ángela de la Cruz interrogate the history of art-in this case the history of the “heroes” of male-dominated painting. Eulàlia Valldosera and Dora García use cinematic sequences or direct texts and quotations to invite us to reflect on women and their historical roles in relation to love, sexuality, and family.

The title of the exhibition, ESCRIBIR TODOS SUS NOMBRES. Write Down All Their Names, comes from the 2001 work 100 obras de arte imposibles (100 Impossible Works of Art) by Dora García. For the work, she lists a hundred sentences on a wall that could be abstract concepts, but also encourage women to become active, to make something possible, to describe the world from a female point of view, to name it, and to claim their own historiography in art as well.

The exhibition ESCRIBIR TODOS SUS NOMBRES is one of approximately 200 cultural events that Spain is promoting in Germany as Guest of Honor at this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair. The realization of the exhibition was supported by the Spanish Embassy and the Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID). The show is a cooperative endeavor between the PalaisPopulaire, Berlin, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Helga de Alvear, Cáceres, and the Spanish Embassy in Berlin.

Next year, ESCRIBIR TODOS SUS NOMBRES will be on view at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Helga de Alvear, Cáceres.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with an introduction by Lola Hinojosa Martínez and an interview with the artists Esther Ferrer and Dora García.

On October 17, at 6 pm, Lola Hinojosa Martínez will lead a tour of the exhibition in a Curator’s Talk.

A comprehensive supporting program accompanies the show. You can find more information at www.db-palaispopulaire.de

Female artists: Elena Asins, Vera Chaves Barcellos, Ángela de la Cruz, Esther Ferrer, Dora García, Sarah Grilo, Cristina Iglesias, Aurèlia Muñoz, Carmen Láffon, Eva Lootz, Erlea Maneros Zabala, Soledad Sevilla, Susana Solano, Montserrat Soto, Eulàlia Valldosera.