MANOLO QUEJIDO: IMMEASURABLE DISTANCE

Miquel Iceta i Llorens Minister of Culture and Sport

Thinking and painting. The passage between these two acts and their connection articulate much of the work of Manolo Quejido. Does the artist think through painting, and is painting the result or the beginning of thought? Since he began his career in the mid-1960s, passing through styles like Pop Art, Expressionism, or geometric experimentation, up to his most recent productions, centered on reflection on painting itself, Manolo Quejido (b. 1946, Seville) has become one of the most prominent figures in the Spanish art of recent decades.

Immeasurable Distance , the anthological exhibition that the Museo Reina Sofía is dedicating to him at the Palacio de Velázquez in Madrid’s Retiro Park, allows us entry to his fascinating creative universe. Through a selection of over one hundred pieces, the show highlights the constants in the development of his oeuvre. Without failing to attend to social and political problems, Quejido has engaged in dialogue with great artists of history, especially Diego de Velázquez, to whom he alludes explicitly in many of his pictures.

This exhibition offers us an opportunity to discover the different phases and facets of the work of this artist, evidencing not only the profoundly experiential character of his artistic investigations of the idea of painting as thought—“as a thing of thinkers, as a thing of painters,” writes the curator of the exhibition, Beatriz Velázquez— but also the lucidity and rigor of his research and his profound critical nonconformity.

Our congratulations to the Museo Reina Sofía for giving the public the chance to (re)discover the passionate and impassioning work of Quejido, an artist who invites and forces us to look differently, and who obliges us to question the way we think and view painting.