The Reina Sofía National Art Center Museumone of the most prestigious in the world, will exhibit the work of the Guatemalan Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa as part of the exhibition Luminous spectra.
With a proposal inspired by the history of the Guatemalan civil war, its social impact and its family experiences, the artist will present, from May 27, fifteen pieces that cover performance, scenery and drawing. In them addresses issues such as childhood, exile and violence of armed conflict.
The exhibition collects works that portray what Ramírez-Figueroa calls “the ghosts that demand justice”, including his two-year-old brother, who died from lack of medical care during the war.
“The soul of this work has to do with my experience of being displaced during the civil war in my country. I grew up surrounded by people also displaced, and this exhibition reflects on a childhood in transition,” explained the artist.
The Museum director, Manuel Segade, described his work as a proposal with “political force, poetic breath and a very special sensitivity” and described it as a “spearhead of art” in Central America.
The exhibition, available until October 20, begins with the installation The illusion of matterthat evokes the author’s childhood memories.
They also include pieces such as The reptilian finger of God and Flamencos chainas well as performance Life in his mouth, death cradles his armdedicated to the memory of the disappeared in Guatemala.
The closure of the sample is marked by Crib and lullaby (2025), an installation carried out for this exhibition, which presents a assembly of broken baby cribs, invaded by spiders, bats and other dreamlike elements, as a reflection of the horrors that children lived victims of the conflict.
The exhibition travels more than a decade of the work of Ramírez-Figueroa, who began his artistic career at age 14 and has developed works centered on rituals, folklore, oral tradition and childhood memories crossed by the 36 years of civil war.
Soledad Leaño, curator of the sample, explained that Luminous spectra He takes his name from the ghosts that populate the artist’s work, in relation to a memory that demands repair. “Part of personal experiences that Naufus Extrapola until converting into universal themes,” he said.
“The practice of Naufus baby of Latin American political activism and experimental theater, questioning the rooted and ferrous stories that have transcended on concrete episodes of the recent past,” highlights the museum’s description.
Ramírez-Figueroa “through the physicality of the bodies and scenographic environments that between fantasy and reality, the artist reviews his own traumas and those of a country marked by colonial extractivism, civil war and the social imbalance of the indigenous population,” Queen Sofia.
Ramírez-Figueroa also exhibits at MoMA
With His work Place of comfortcarries your performative proposal to the Modern Art Museum in New York (MoMA), To represent the censorship that existed on the theater in the seventies in Guatemala.
The creation of Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, together with the poet Wingston González, will be exhibited at MoMA, after this museum acquired the piece permanently.
The work, inspired by the attack suffered by the theater company of the Popular University during the premiere of The heart of scarecrowsat the time of the armed conflict, it is a tribute to the theater as a political resistance channel.
*** With EFE Agency Information