ARTres. The museum as it should be is the latest chapter of the Art and the (Art) System Project, with which Artium, while exhibiting the most iconic works of its Collection (in The Art exhibition), gave a frank account of the history of the Collection and of all the processes involved in its acquisition and conservation (The Art System). In the case of Art, the majority of the works have been selected, displayed and mounted in accordance with 20th-century dictates. The new exhibition attempts to open an debate on the way that museums, especially those of contemporary art, must organise themselves, collect and exhibit artworks and “accept the challenges of the present on a daily basis in order to shape the future”.

ARTres, which stands alongside and acts as the counterpoint of The Art, is organised around two key ideas: art, of one era or another, of one gender or another, examines the same questions; women, as a group, are conquering social spaces that had been denied to them and art is not an exception.

On the one hand, all of the works that form part of ARTres - all of them, except for four, have been produced this century – are organised along three lines of discourse: introspection (the individual and his/her inner existence), inspection (the world, landscape, politics, conflict) and art itself (creativity, aesthetics). These are exactly the same issues around which the works included in Art are arranged; in this way, the new exhibition of the Collection defends the validity of the great interests of artists throughout time and irrespective of their gender.

On the other, ARTres poses the question of gender as one of the great challenges for the present and future of museums as institutions and, in general, of the entire art system. As Daniel Castillejo indicates, «we must first conquer the spaces in our society denied to women and then regularise these; art is one of the most glaring examples of this». All the works selected for the exhibition with the exception of one have been produced by female artists and together represent, on the one hand, an intense aesthetic experience, and on the other draw attention to the issue of gender in art.

Moreover, with this aim, the Museum has organised a roundtable to be held prior to the inauguration of ARTres, in which four female artists, Concha Jerez, Ixone Sádaba, Maite Martínez de Arenaza and Charo Garaigorta, will set out their respective viewpoints on this subject. There will be no entry fee to attend wither the roundtable or the inauguration.