Josep Renau (Valencia, 1907 – Berlin, 1982) is considered one of the most prominent figures of the avant-garde in Spain. Having introduced the political photomontage in our country, Renau was also a poster artist, muralist, editor, agitator and theorist of the arts. His early activism in the Communist Party led him, until the end of his life, to promote a conception of art at the service of revolution and social change.

Between September 1936 and April 1938, during the Spanish Civil War, Renau was appointed general director of Fine Arts of the Government of the Republic, a position from which he promoted the evacuation of the Artistic Treasure of Madrid, as well as the implementation of the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 International Fair in Paris, a propaganda event in favour of the republican cause in which Pablo Picasso presented his work Guernica.

The exhibit presents a review of his long and complex artistic career through a selection of more than one hundred and fifty works including posters, magazines, documents and photomontages made by Renau during his republican period, during his long exile in Mexico (1939-1958). and in the former German Democratic Republic (1958-1982). It is structured in four sections: The years of the 2nd Republic; Exile in Mexico; The American Way of Life Series: Renau in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

The works that make up this exhibit come entirely from the museum’s collection and the Josep Renau Foundation, an institution that deposited the artist’s library, archive and personal collection at the IVAM in 1989. The exhibit has previously been presented at the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid.

Juana Francés began her artistic activity in the 1950s, when the first symptoms of artistic renewal started to appear in Francoist Spain. Establishing connections with the avant-garde circles that gathered in Madrid, Juana Francés was the only female member of El Paso, a group born under the influence of American Abstract Expressionism and its gestural and material violence. However, she left the group in 1957, precisely because of the contempt for her art and her condition as a woman shown by some of the other members at a time when art was still an area dominated by men.

Until 1960, Juana produced works in which she aggregated different textures, sober colours (blacks, whites and earth tones) and new materials like river sands. From 1963, and for nearly twenty years, she produced her series El hombre y la ciudad (Man and the City), a depiction of a stifling and distressing human environment resulting from the growing industrialisation and economic development in urban Spain after the application of the Stabilisation Plan of 1959. Later, in the 1980s, the artist returned to abstraction. Between 1986 and 1990, the year of her death, she produced her series Fondos Submarinos (Submarine Depths), Cometas (Comets) and Escudos (Shields), where she experimented once more with material and gesture in an attempt to transfer movement to the support, drawing inspiration from the cosmos or the depths of the sea, and using the circle and rectangle as principal motifs.

Industry. Matrices, threads and sounds is a hybrid proposal that is situated between the creation of an archive and an artistic project. Its objective is to offer a necessarily partial reading of Valencian industrial heritage based on the sound, the intangible and social movements. The proposal is developed through the compilation of sounds, processes, images, videos, music, art pieces and discourses linked to factories in their original context of use, but also in their abandonment and their conversion into heritage spaces. Industry focuses particularly on the proactive uses of industrial heritage driven by citizens.

In addition to the archive and the meetings (called matrices) to debate and reflection,the project has been presented in the expositive format at the IVAM-Centre Julio González (May–October 2021) and in the IVAM Alcoi (January–April 2022). This exhibit is proposed as the museographic adaptation of the archive in the form of installation, inspired by the “Working Club” of Aleksandr Rodchenko.

Industry. Matrices, threads and sound is a process of memory that remains open to negotiation and new readings. The project is positioned outside the romanticizing image of industrial ruin. Understanding heritage and history as living processes that allow us to generate conceptual tools to understand the past, present and future of the history of labor and its relationship with culture. The proposal is developed by Lorenzo Sandoval, artist and curator, and Tono Vizcaíno, archaeologist and heritage manager.