‘Pieza Única’ is presenting Manolo Millares’s ‘Personaje caído I’ from 9 September 2026 to 16 February 2027. The temporary gallery is devoted to displaying a single work from the Reina Sofía’s collection.
The presentation coincides with the centenary of Millares’s birth: he was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in 1926 and died in Madrid in 1972. The Reina Sofía holds around thirty works by Millares, including prints, drawings and paintings, and describes him as a major representative of informalism and a key figure in Spanish painting in the second half of the twentieth century.
‘Personaje caído I’ was made barely two years before Millares’s premature death at the age of 46, when he was achieving substantial international success. The museum describes the painting as an anguished protest with the atmosphere of a crucifixion: a disjointed work stretched like a shroud over a calm red horizon with the tone of dried blood, from whose violence white emerges as both mourning and hope. Millares described his artistic purpose in the words: ‘Creo que mi arte es una bofetada a la muerte para justificar la vida’.
From 17 to 19 December, several of Millares’s films will be shown, including ‘Millares 1970’ (1970), which connects the burlap works with the collective graves of the Spanish Civil War; ‘Eros Taro’ (1969), which moves through Lanzarote’s lunar landscape and César Manrique’s houses as refuges amid the weight of Francoism; and ‘Diciembre 68 enero’ (1968), family Super 8 films that reveal a fascination with the culture of death in Iberian archaeology and offer new readings of his own work.
