Intervention of Los Bravú at the Palacio de la Música

La Casa Encendida of Fundación Montemadrid has sponsored an intervention by Los Bravú on the façade of the Palacio de la Música in the nation’s capital. The work is a large-scale undertaking, done in the blue tiles that are prevalent on so many of Madrid’s façades, representing a vindication of culture and the environment.

This work of art, located on the busiest thoroughfare in Spain, takes up 170 square metres. It is 30 metres wide and almost 5 metres in height. Created from sketches prepared using techniques that ranged from watercolours to felt pens, the piece depicts current situations, characters and objects in classical style.

The patterns of typical Madrid tiles are mainly figurative, and have been used traditionally to decorate buildings, restaurants and historical shops in the city. Many of these tiled surfaces have been lost. Los Bravú have taken inspiration from this classic imagery, which they have put through the filter of their iconic productions to create a series of predominantly contemporary female figures, represented in the manner of the Renaissance, to capture the viewer’s attention. Dea Gómez (Salamanca, 1989) and Diego Omil (Pontevedra, 1988), known as Los Bravú, have once again filled Madrid’s Gran Vía with tiles, intermingling the cultural past, present and future in one of the capital’s most emblematic streets, where the Fundación Montemadrid’s Palacio de la Música will once again stand out as a point of reference.

The mural also includes QR codes linking to La Casa On, the Casa Encendida’s digital platform. Passers-by will have the chance to scan these codes and access a permanently updated series of online programmes offering free content in five distinct areas:

• La Casa Encendida Radio, an experimental sound platform exploring the radio format from an artistic perspective, including podcasts like Bam Bam. Chica for chica, a radio programme mapping the all-female musical scene; You Got to Get In to Get Out, a podcast devoted to techno music as a cultural, social, historical and material form of artistic expression; or Terrordrome, a programme on horror films, presented by Anna Bogutskaya and created together with Chino Moya.

• Recommended cultural, musical and film events like the Magnetic Terrace concerts, the Audioactivity festival or the section Give Me Five, including five cultural recommendations by artists, curators, thinkers and writers.

• Inspiring voices like those of Amaranta Gómez, Brigitte Baptiste, Nora Chipaumire, Noha El Haddad and Daniel Innerarity.

• Ecology and citizenship through content such as the recent interview with Orsola de Castro or the encounter between Yayo Herrero and Kois Casadevante.

• The children’s section offers Olga de Dios’s audio story En familia [All in the Family], Nano4814’s playlist, or the workshop “La comida cobra vida” [Food Comes to Life], by Mari Miyazawa, teaching participants how to turn their school lunch into an eatable work of art.

Through La Casa On, the Casa Encendida has produced many online events since the beginning of the pandemic, aimed at enlarging and further developing cultural, social and public service amenities, as Fundación Montemadrid’s cultural agency has been doing ever since 2002. La Casa On is a virtual platform engaged in offering new formats for creative events, exhibitions and knowledge contents that expand and disseminate its programmes through time, geographical boundaries and artistic disciplines.

Los Bravú are Dea Gómez (Salamanca, 1989) and Diego Omil (Pontevedra, 1988). They have developed a multidisciplinary career that merges painting, sculpture and comic art. Los Bravú resort to different forms of expression in an attempt to analyse contemporary issues such as touristification, the life of young people in rural environments or the relationship between human beings and the digital media. Their most recent shows at art centres include Processi 144_M, entrelazarse con Roma (Matadero, Madrid), Brillas muchísimo (DA2 Museo de Arte Moderno, Salamanca) or Unflappable (Unit 1, London). In 2020 they began to work in the sphere of the scenic arts, presenting their spectacle Cuaderno de Vacaciones at the Escenas do cambio festival.

The Palacio de la Música: Almost 100 Years of History

The Palacio de la Música is an emblematic building on Madrid’s Gran Vía thoroughfare, the work of architect Secundino Zuazo, dating from 1926. Fundación Montemadrid is working on a refurbishment programme that will convert the premises into a first-rate cultural facility. The goal is to recover the building and reinstate it as a reference performance space in the capital and beyond. The project, approved by the Madrid city council Local Committee on Historic Heritage in April 2020, respects the original construction and strictly complies with the protection measures required by law with regard to listed buildings. The original building’s preservation is at the heart of the project, which updates the facility’s needs and uses, creating areas for restaurants and other purposes, and relaunches it as a cultural space for the 21st century.

Fundación Montemadrid is a private, nonprofit institution working towards inclusion and equal opportunities, citizen participation and access to education, employment and culture within the context of environmental conservation. The Fundation maintains and manages social and cultural centres like La Casa Encendida or the Casa San Cristóbal, and educational centres, libraries, facilities for senior citizens, special employment centres and various other spaces that are managed, on a third-party basis, by different social and other institutions.