Old Mistresses. Editing Gombrich. Performance by Maria Gimeno

Date

Friday, 6 November 2026 at 19:00

Venue

Museo Reina Sofía · Calle Santa Isabel, 52, Madrid

Price

See source

Where Are the Women Artists? Queridas Viejas (Old Mistresses) is a performance lecture by Maria Gimeno, who, for more than a decade, has questioned the narrative of art history built from the exclusion of women. With a kitchen knife, Gimeno cuts open E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art to create a space and fill it with pages devoted to artists considered excluded, with a view to building a narrative that does not omit their contributions for gender reasons. The act involves thickening the book without altering its original content. Gombrich’s choice was no coincidence. First published in 1950, The Story of Art became one of the twentieth century’s most influential introductory art books and a core reference point in building the Western canon. Its narrative thread preserves the figure of the man as the creative genius, excluding women artists from its pages. Gimeno’s performance starts from this absence to physically intervene in the canon and question how art history is constructed and who decides which artists deserve to be part of it. Throughout the performance, Gimeno ranges across, in an ordered, dynamic fashion, nearly one thousand years of artistic creation to incorporate ninety or so women artists. Each new page opens space to an artist, and their life and work, along with images which allow for their contributions to be recovered and to include them in the narrative from which they were excluded. Started in 2014, Old Mistresses has been performed at institutions such as the Museo Nacional del Prado, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and Museo Kaluz and Museo Cabañas, both in Mexico, as well as in Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna. Over time, the project has become academic in scope, with performances and collaborations linked to universities such as the Complutense University of Madrid, University College London and The University of the West Indies (Kingston, Jamaica). Its international journey through Europe and Latin America contributes to expanding the project via new investigations and contexts. In its embodiment in the Museo Reina Sofía, Old Mistresses centres on women artists in the Collection, recovering their works and careers and situating them inside a broader narrative of artistic creation. Essentially, a new intervention in the canon from the same place in which it is conserved, studied and transmitted.

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