Marisa González. A Generative Way
This retrospective, curated by the art historian and researcher Violeta Janeiro Alfageme, covers five decades of the artist’s production and features a wide selection of her major series and projects.
A series of works from the 1970s, produced at the Generative Systems Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is testimony to the artist’s early and lasting interest in communications technologies and image reproduction, an interest that has placed González at the forefront of such experimenting. In fact, in 1986, the artist from Bilbao was part of the curator team of one of the inaugural exhibitions of the Reina Sofía Art Museum Procesos: cultura y nuevas tecnologías. [Processes: Culture and New Technologies]
Over the course of her career, Marisa González has shown interest in feminist themes, social movements, industrial architecture, waste and disposal, to name but a few. Recent research into feminist genealogies of institutional art has highlighted her significant role thanks to her early links to feminism.
Azkuna Zentroa – Alhóndiga Bilbao was involved in production of this project of the Reina Sofía National Museum Art Centre, where it was on show between May and September. The exhibition project will be on at Azkuna Zentroa from 29 October and will focus on the installations from the last twenty-five years. It unfolds around the industrial landscape of Bilbao and two seminal works in the artist’s career: the photographs and videos documenting the dismantling of the Harino Panadera factory in Bilbao and the Lemoiz Nuclear Power Plant.
Marisa González, the winner of the 2023 Velázquez Visual Arts Prize in recognition of her long career as a multimedia artist, has been a trailblazer in the use of new technologies from the 1970s to the present day.
She was born in Bilbao in 1943 and lives in Madrid. She studied piano to degree level at Bilbao Conservatoire, graduated in Fine Arts from the Fine Arts Faculty of Complutense University of Marid (1971), and has a Master’s Degree from the Generative Systems Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1973) and a BFA from the Corcoran School of Art, Washington D.C. (1976).
Her whole artistic career is marked by the systematic relationship with the ever-changing technologies of today’s society. From her initial work with photocopies in the early 1970s, then with faxes, and later with computers and video.
Marisa González has generated a new language that she has codified in the symbiosis between art and technology, and assembling different techniques as her method. The reproduction of images, and of the fragment and its repetition or generation of the form as emblematic values of the contemporary are present throughout her work.
Feminism, industrial archaeology and memory, recycling and ecology, and focus on the exclusion and precariousness processes are other points that characterise her career.
She is a tireless gleaner of industrial archaeologies, documents and archives, and has always remained committed as regards social inequalities and the environmental threats in our globalised world.
Marisa González’s work is in multiple museums and collections, and she has put on over 60 solo shows and 150 group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, the Reina Sofía National Museum Art Centre, Tabacalera (Madrid), and the Barcelona Contemporary Cultural Centre (CCCB). She has been cited as a reference in a myriad of publications, such as Arte en España (1939-2015) by Jorge Luis Marzo & Patricia Mayayo, and La fotografía en España. De los orígenes al siglo XXI.
She runs workshops, gives lectures and speaks at conferences on New Technologies, where she is one of the trailblazing artists.
