David Wojnarowicz, History Keeps Me Awake at Night

Curators: David Breslin y David Kiehl

Coordinator: Rafael García Horrillo

Assistant Coordinator: Joel Butler Fernández

Date: May – September 2019

Venue: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain.

Exhibition website

Exhibition Video

From the late 1970s until his untimely death in 1992 through AIDS-related complications, David Wojnarowicz (New Jersey, USA, 1954 — New York, USA, 1992) produced a body of work that was as conceptually rigorous as it was stylistically diverse. His artistic career fused a broad array of forms, mediums, and devices, for instance, the use of photography as a narrative tool; collage as a resource for critique and political statements, stressed through the poverty of the medium; painting adopted to explore different allegorical processes, and photomontage and text employed as an approach to the queer and identity politics that also shaped his role as an activist. Coming to prominence in the socially and culturally vibrant East Village scene in New York in the 1980s, Wojnarowicz’s work is also a testament to the end of the art collectives forged in the preceding decades and defined by their members’ financial precariousness and their anti-establishment, collaborative and experimental spirit. 

*Organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg