Cuaderno de aves para el príncipe Baltasar Carlos [Notebook of Birds for Prince Balthasar Charles]
María Eugenia de Beer
De Beer worked in the family studio under the tutelage of her father. After marrying, she gave up her artistic career. She produced very little work. Or, at least, she signed very little. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, the oldest female artist in this collection was most likely Anon.
José Ramón Álvarez-Rendueles
Isabel Quintanilla
The collection only regularly began to include works by women artists in the 1980s. Over subsequent decades, the numbers increased. In 1985, for the first time the bank commissioned a portrait of a bank governor from a female artist. The painter was Isabel Quintanilla, and her sitter was José Ramón Álvarez-Rendueles.
José Moñino y Redondo, I conde de Floridablanca [José Moñino y Redondo, I Count of Floridablanca]
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes
Needless to say, the bank's gallery of portraits of governors, directors and other leading figures associated with the institution is made up entirely of men. In all, there are around eighty portraits. Between the oldest, of the Count of Floridablanca, and the most recent, of Luis María Linde, 237 years have passed. Both men are depicted facing the viewer.
Retrato de Luis María Linde [Portrait of Luis María Linde]
Carmen Laffón
Needless to say, the bank's gallery of portraits of governors, directors and other leading figures associated with the institution is made up entirely of men. In all, there are around eighty portraits. Between the oldest, of the Count of Floridablanca, and the most recent, of Luis María Linde, 237 years have passed. Both men are depicted facing the viewer.
Sin título (de la serie Contemporáneos) [Untitled (from the Contemporaneous series)]
Alicia Martín
Books are normally depicted as a kind of attribute denoting prestige or authority. In Alicia Martín's work, however, they are shown at the precise instant when they about to come tumbling down, symbolising the collapse of the edifice of pretentious certainties of Eurocentric modernity.
Contrato [Contract]
Sara Ramo
Ramo's strips of paper are almost reminiscent of what happens when you give a child an old —and thus useless— newspaper to play with. It is a metaphor too for the obsolescence of Western modernity's priorities and hierarchies.
Copa [Cup]
Eva Lootz
Eva Lootz's work could scarcely be more European. In it, there is not the slightest hint of exoticism. What does mark her work out, however, is the way in which it breaches the bounds of the exclusive rationality that is so characteristic of Western thought. Her entire oeuvre is a vindication of materiality, of the corporeal dimension of signs.
María Cristina de Habsburgo-Lorena con Alfonso XIII [Maria Christina of Austria with Alfonso XIII of Spain]
Manuel Yus y Colas
Among all the portraits of queens, it is perhaps the one of Maria Christina of Austria with the infant Alfonso XIII that best illustrates the role of the female body within the social machinery of the patriarchy, as an intermediate font for reproducing legitimacy.
Virgen del lirio [Madonna of the Lily]
Cornelis van Cleve
Like every other depiction of the 'Madonna with Child', that symbol of joyous submission to a higher mandate, this painting is a defence of patient acceptance of sacrifice, the self-denial of the wife and mother for the sake of the true protagonists (who are usually male).
La tierra [The Land]
Joaquim Sunyer
Somewhere midway between the Franco regime's policies of self-sufficiency and economic development, these paintings constitute a crystal-clear lesson on the idealisation of motherhood as a strategy of alienation. They also champion the sexual division of labour— one recognised and remunerated, the other devalued to the point of being made invisible. Women's work in reproduction and care was naturalised as 'sus labores' [her tasks] 'labores propias de su sexo' [tasks befitting her sex].
El mar [The Sea]
Daniel Vázquez Díaz
Somewhere midway between the Franco regime's policies of self-sufficiency and economic development, these paintings constitute a crystal-clear lesson on the idealisation of motherhood as a strategy of alienation. They also champion the sexual division of labour— one recognised and remunerated, the other devalued to the point of being made invisible. Women's work in reproduction and care was naturalised as 'sus labores' [her tasks] 'labores propias de su sexo' [tasks befitting her sex].
Un toque femenino (servilleta, silicona y palito de algodón) [A Feminine Touch (Serviette, Silicon and Cotton Bud)]
Ana Prada
Ana Prada's work might also seem to be an allusion these 'tasks befitting her sex': The very title, 'A Feminine Touch', takes an ironic sideswipe at the patriarchal myths of the 'eternal feminine' or the 'angel of the home'.
Monumento a Echegaray [Monument to Echegaray]
Lorenzo Coullaut Valera
Public monuments suddenly began to sprout a proliferation of compliant nymphs just at a time when women were gradually being accepted into the public sphere and the world of employment and academia. It was time of radical transformation in women's fashion and the emergence of the first feminist organisations.
Conjunto para el salón de baile del príncipe Alexis Mdivani [Ensemble for Prince Alexis Mdivani's ballroom]
Josep María Sert i Badía
The abolition of slavery in Cuba was a long process, lasting from the 1870s to the 1890s. Throughout this time, any attempt at social advancement by the newly freed black slaves was systematically met with ridicule and caricatures of their aspirations to emulate their former masters.
The Ngombo (Serie) [The Ngombo (Series)]
Maria Loboda
There is a poem by Alfonsina Storni (she calls it an antisonnet) which begins with the typical chaotic list —'amidst handkerchiefs, letters / dry flowers, squeeze tubes, banknotes, lottery tickets and nougat'— before ending, in an unexpected twist, with the line 'was my handbag with its bomb inside'.
Baile andaluz con emparrado [Andalusian Dance with Bower]
José Villegas y Cordero
Modernisation, 'progress' and all its consequences led to an unprecedented interest in folk and regional culture. This newfound keenness for tradition and its idealisation —or even invention— arose precisely at a time when the selfsame process of modernisation was irredeemably dooming such cultures to extinction.
Invasión Sucesión 20 [Invasion Succession 20]
Montserrat Soto
The muted marks of the process of extracting capital from historically excluded groups. A distant neatness in itself evokes the invisibilisation of plunder, the systematic sacrifice on the altar of progress of the flesh and blood of lives deemed expendable and disposable, alongside other 'natural resources'.
Dios de la fruta [God of Fruit]
Gabriel Morcillo Raya
In this painting, the artist plays with transgression and transvestism. Nonetheless, he cannot hide the hierarchy, the mechanics of domination, the fact that there is one individual who is entitled to utilise the other, to instrumentalise his or her image — whether it be Franco with his Moorish Guard, General Valera garbed in his djellaba or Morcillo with his soft porn.
Seduzir [To Seduce]
Helena Almeida
As in all of Almeida's later work, the principal, and practically exclusive, protagonist of this disturbing photograph is the fragmented image of the artist's own body. Not only is it a field of work and research; it is as an active subject, lying somewhere at the antipodes of the conventional portrait.