Marisa González: half a century of technology and art

That is the background, at least up to today, of the Bilbao artist Marisa González: half a century of technology and art. And that is what the anthology she opened this year in Madrid at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía shows.

The title of the exhibition is A way of doing generative and its anthological nature, the recognition of an artist ahead of her time, affirms the museum.

All the reviews written about her mention the pioneering character of her work for combining artistic creation with new communication technologies, including image reproduction in different formats. She received the Velázquez Award for the Arts in 2023.

Her comfort in that context is demonstrated by an extraordinary detail (in the sense that it is not something found on artists' websites): her biography is not just a text hosted on her website (the usual), but also includes biographical reviews posted on Wikipedia in English and Spanish.

Another striking detail: at the presentation press conference for this anthology, she attended wearing the same dress she wore at the inauguration of the MNCARS in 1986, an event in which she participated as one of the curators of the exhibitions at that time. She acknowledged that she has worked for years on her projects and keeps everything.

The language of immediacy

This major anthology, curated by art historian and researcher Violeta Janeiro Alfageme, gathers five decades of the artist's production and displays nearly twenty of her major series and projects.

The artist distances herself from conventional media and uses machines — color photocopiers, thermal fax machines, and other tools that were cutting-edge technology at the time — to conceive an art that is not copying or replicative but generative.

Marisa González has created her own method, a language, in which immediacy, chance, trial, and error take center stage.

Since her beginnings, she has participated in and promoted “a new order in which works that are not painting, nor printmaking, nor photography, but combine all of them, applying reproduction and image production technologies based on electricity, electronics, and telecommunications,” affirms the curator.

Janeiro highlights the artist's ability, after her learning stay in the United States, “to generate subversive thinking through visual anomalies that arise from handling the earliest communication technologies.”

“Distortion – she adds – is a crucial skill for someone who, from her first steps in art, challenged a context where norms and powers of the Francoist dictatorship drastically restricted the freedom to imagine and think.”

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Photos: courtesy of the press service of MNCARS

A work committed to its time

Throughout her career, she has been interested in feminist themes, social movements, industrial architecture, waste and discard, among other topics. Marisa González explores serial production processes.

The MNCARS exhibition gathers some of her most significant series such as Violence Woman, which includes the work The Download (1975-77). Or the series Presences (1981), with which she radically advocates recycling (of lint accumulated in the dryer filter, for example) and re-signification of objects.

The projects Ellas, filipinas (2010-2013) and Nuclear Lemóniz (2004-2008) are presented in an articulated manner, both framed as proposals that address major issues from different perspectives.

In Ellas, Filipinas, the artist focuses on the exploitation situation faced by thousands of migrant women in Hong Kong and highlights their conditions of inequality and vulnerability.

In the case of Nuclear Lemóniz, she documents the dismantling process of an infrastructure considered an environmental risk that never operated, thanks to mobilization and social pressure exerted by citizens.

We can also see the portrait series she made through the graphic computer system Lumena or the installation Fax Station that she created at the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid in 1993, with which the artist promoted a more community-oriented, less competitive, and more horizontal dynamic among artists.

And in autumn, in Bilbao

From very early on, Marisa González has been a committed and associative person. In 1970, she participated in the creation of Madrid's first professional artists' association, and in 2009, of the Association of Women in the Visual Arts (MAV).

Today, she remains very connected to feminism through initiatives like the editor group Cuarto Propio on Wikipedia, where she is the author or co-author of hundreds of articles about women protagonists of contemporary art.

The exhibition curator considers that Marisa González is a “woman ahead of her time who has broken norms, who fought in the anti-Franco struggle, in associationism, and joined feminism, and whose legacy needed to be brought to light, which is like a black hole, due to its vastness, and unfortunately mostly accumulated in her studio.”

Organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in collaboration with Azkuna Zentroa – Alhóndiga Bilbao, the Un modo de hacer generativo exhibition will be open in autumn after its run in Madrid at Azkuna Zentroa – Alhóndiga Bilbao.

Exhibition Marisa González. A way of doing generative
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
Edificio Nouvel. Ronda de Atocha, s/n. Madrid.Madrid.
Until September 22.
Hours: Monday to Saturday and holidays from 10:00 to 21:00.
Sunday from 10:00 to 14:30.
Closed Tuesdays