Art Madrid'26 – Art and Science in Thyssen Museum Madrid

 

Ten selected pieces from the Thyssen´s collection that show how scientific advances have been in many cases the engine and influence for the arts since the late twentieth century. Humanism, industrialization, theories of color and light, the discovery of landscapes and species, botany, fauna, ... the search for answers and the questions to understand the world and how nature works is a feature shared between scientists and artists, and the exhibition portrays these connections.

The limits of the universe, the natural sciences, the wildlife, were the main focus of work of nineteenth century American artists, specialists in  landscapes as we can see in works such as Summer in the Catskills, by James McDougal Hart, in South American Landscape, by Frederic Edwin Church, or the  magnificent Orchid and Hummingbird, painted by Martin Johnson Heade.

 

 

 

After this first group of works, there is a serie devoted to the scientific theories of color and light, in which the French painters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were great specialists: Matisse, Seurat's followers as Signat, Fauvism, the futurist with Gino Severini and his paint Expansion of Light, centrifugal and centripetal, or the work of Sonia Delaunay Simultaneous Contrasts, are examples in the exhibition of these chromatic studies and treatises on optics.

 

 

 

In a third section appears three-dimensional concept, with whom the artists attempted to create new spatial dimensions in relation with the modern geometric theories chased by the avant-garde artists: the fourth dimension of the Cubists, the total representation searched by masters as Picasso, Max Weber - with Terminal Station or Grand Central-Kupka, with Location of mobile graphics.

 

 

 

Art and Science is located in the lookout balcony on the first floor of the Thyssen Museum until September 27, 2015.


ABIERTO INFINITO. LO QUE EL CUERPO RECUERDA. PERFORMANCE CYCLE X ART MADRID'26


Art Madrid, committed to creating a discursive platform for artists working within the field of performance and action art, presents Abierto Infinito: lo que el cuerpo recuerda, a proposal inspired by Erving Goffman’s ideas in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Amorrortu Editores, Buenos Aires, 1997).

The project unfolds within a theoretical framework that directly engages with these premises, conceiving social interaction as a stage of carefully modulated performances designed to influence others’ perceptions. Goffman argues that individuals deploy both verbal and involuntary expressions to guide the interpretation of their behavior, sustaining roles and façades that define the situation for those who observe.

The body — the first territory of all representation — precedes both word and learned gesture. Human experience, conscious and unconscious alike, is inscribed within it. Abierto Infinito: lo que el cuerpo recuerda departs from this premise: representation inhabits existence itself, and life, understood as a succession of representations, transforms the body into a space of constant negotiation over who we are. In this passage, boundaries blur; the individual opens toward the collective, and the ephemeral acquires symbolic dimension. By inhabiting this interstice, performance simultaneously reveals the fragility of identity and the strength that emerges from encounter with others.


PERFORMANCE: ALTA FACTURA. BY COLECTIVO LA BURRA NEGRA

March 4 | 7:00 PM. Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles.


"Discipline for Power.” Performance by La Burra Negra for Displacement of the Congress of Deputies by Roger Bernat. 2025.


Alta Factura subverts the conventional structure of the fashion runway to foreground the often-invisible processes that underpin artistic production. Through a series of conceptual textile works, the performance draws attention to the discipline of craft and the artist’s vulnerability, ultimately revealing those seams typically consigned to the margins, behind the scenes.


Colectivo La Burra Negra.


ABOUT EL COLECTIVO LA BURRA NEGRA

La Burra Negra is a nomadic performance art collective based in Málaga, founded in 2024 following its first residency in Totalán. The group is self-managed by Ascensión Soto Fernández, Gabriela Feldman de la Rocha, Sasha Camila Falcke, Sara Gema Domínguez Castillo, Sofía Barco Sánchez, and Regina Lagos González—six artists from diverse backgrounds and trajectories who met at the Hospital de Artistas at La Juan Gallery.

The collective brings together practitioners working across jewelry, painting, the performing arts, music, dance, cultural mediation, and arts management. Its activities include an annual residency in Totalán, the production of performative works, cultural mediation initiatives, and site-responsive interventions.

Since its inception, the collective has participated in the Periscopio series at La Térmica; presented A granel at the MVA in Málaga; carried out a number of actions in Totalán—the most recent during its second annual residency—and contributed its own proposals to the performance Displacement of the Congress of Deputies by Roger Bernat in Madrid.

At the core of La Burra Negra lies a commitment to collective creation and the exchange of knowledge. United in their effort to experiment with and disseminate performance art, the group explores the invisible dimensions of artistic labor—its temporalities, efforts, and relational dynamics, which so often remain unseen—as a form of critical affirmation.

Their practice emerges from dialogue and shared reflection, in the pursuit of decentralized spaces where art can be experienced and its processes made visible. Each residency and each action becomes an attempt to inhabit creation collectively, challenging conditions of precarity while fostering networks of care and collaboration that sustain both their own practice and that of those around them.