MALAGA.- The Museo Picasso Málaga has opened its 2026 exhibition program with a powerful and quietly radical proposal: Elena Asins. Antigone, now on view in the museum’s temporary galleries. The exhibition, which opened on January 30, brings together two final works by the late Spanish artist—Antigone and Hemon—in what reads less like a retrospective and more like a philosophical statement.

At the heart of the show stands Antigone (2010–2015), a monumental sculpture that feels at once austere and uncompromising. Built from the Greek letters that spell the heroine’s name, the work transforms language into structure, turning typography into architecture. Its severe geometry and dark, industrial presence evoke silence, resistance, and an ethical stance that refuses negotiation. Far from decorative, the sculpture confronts visitors with the moral weight of Sophocles’ tragic figure, whose defiance of unjust law continues to resonate across centuries.

The sculpture belongs to the collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and is presented here as the symbolic culmination of Asins’s career. Known for her intellectual rigor and her lifelong distance from artistic fashions, Asins conceived Antigone as a work in which law, ethics, and language collide. The choice of materials—corten steel, an internal tubular structure, and industrial finishes—reinforces the sense that this is not merely a sculpture, but a conceptual construction built on thought as much as form.

The exhibition deepens with Hemon, an eight-hour black-and-white video that unfolds in a continuous projection. Completed shortly before Asins’s death in 2015, the piece takes its name from Antigone’s fiancé and operates as a counterpoint to the sculpture. If Antigone embodies ethical resistance, Hemon gives voice to witnessing without power. Repetitive images, silences, distorted speech, and minimal visual elements create an enclosed universe where language seems to trap meaning rather than release it.

Watching even fragments of Hemon requires patience and active engagement. The work does not explain itself; instead, it demands that viewers reconstruct its sense internally. This approach reflects the philosophical influences that shaped Asins’s thinking, particularly Ludwig Wittgenstein and Max Bense, and reinforces her belief that art is not something to be consumed quickly, but something to be thought through.

Together, Antigone and Hemon offer a contemporary rereading of classical tragedy. Asins returns to Sophocles not to illustrate the myth, but to interrogate it: to question the dangers of rigid obedience to law, the cost of moral inflexibility, and the solitude of ethical resistance. In doing so, the exhibition subtly echoes the artist’s own biography—a life marked by discipline, independence, and an unwavering commitment to intellectual coherence.

An educational space completes the exhibition, offering context through texts and the documentary Genesis (2014), directed by Álvaro Giménez Sarmiento. The short film, which won the Audience Award at the Málaga Film Festival, provides a rare, intimate glimpse into Asins’s world, weaving together her voice, her ideas, and the stark landscape of Azpíroz, the Navarrese village where she spent her final years.

Elena Asins. Antigone is presented as part of the Museo Picasso Málaga’s Guest Work program, which has previously featured artists such as James Turrell and William Kentridge. Organized in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía, the exhibition marks the first monographic museum presentation dedicated specifically to this final body of work by Asins.

As Miguel López-Remiro, the exhibition’s curator and artistic director of the museum, has noted, the show places at its center an artist for whom art was never separate from thought or responsibility. In Málaga, Asins’s Antigone now stands not only as a tribute on the tenth anniversary of her death, but as a demanding reminder that art can still confront us with questions about justice, conscience, and the limits of language—questions that remain as urgent today as they were in ancient Thebes.