Mathias Goeritz

The Museo Reina Sofía presents The Return of the Snake: Mathias Goeritz and the Invention of Emotional Architecture, an exhibition centered on the artistic production of the Mexican painter (born in Germany) after he settled in Mexico and on the "emotional architecture" principle in his work. The exhibition approaches the "emotional architecture" principle as the element on which the curatorial discourse is constructed. Formulated by Mathias Goeritz in1954, this principle became the energizing center as well as the theoretical and aesthetic basis for his work. With it, the artist expressed the need to invent spaces, works and objects that generate the most emotion on modern men before functionalism, aestheticism and personal authorship. Open to the public until April 13 of 2015, the exhibition proposes a survey of the emblematic works by Goeritz as it underscores the manner in which his body of work and his artistic endeavor emerges from the assumption of art as a meta-artistic project that also extends to the social, political and public realms. A project in which a primal form, namely the lines that form the contour of a serpent's body in La Serpiente de El Eco (The El Eco Snake, 1953), becomes a formal and conceptual module of an entire oeuvre developed in the context of the cold war. The exhibition consists of two hundred pieces, including sketches, drawings, mockups, sculptures, photographs and paintings on wood that show an inquisitive and experimental Goeritz who is ludic and analytic at once, and who created art with a social and political public dimension through which he explored the plausible social functions of design.