Libres Para Siempre is a Spanish pop-inspired artist collective founded in 1989, composed of Beatriz Alegre, Almudena Baeza, Alberto Cortés, Juan Jarén, Miguel Ángel Martín, Álvaro Monge, Ana Parga, and Mª Luz Ruiz.

Their first exhibition took place in 1990 at Sala Estrujenbank, associated with the collective of the same name. This experience established a lasting professional and personal relationship between the two groups.

In their initial phase, the group remained anonymous and used various names for their projects (such as Arigato Obrigado, La Rubia, G.A., Agradezco Esta Oportunidad, Artistas Todos, and more). These names often changed with each exhibition. In their next phase, as they transitioned to electronic art and began engaging with the Internet, they adopted the permanent name Libres Para Siempre.

They have exhibited in both commercial galleries (Fúcares, Almagro, 1991; Buades, 1992; DoblEspacio, 1998; Valle Quintana, 2000) and alternative spaces (El Ojo Atómico, Sala Cruce). They have also participated in fairs (ARCO 1992, ARCO 1996, ARCO 2001), performance festivals (IIFIARP, 1992; Faculty of Fine Arts Performance Festival, Cuenca, 1998; Cha Cha Chá, 1999; Pasen y Vean at CCCB, 1999; Doméstico 2000;
Faculty of Fine Arts Performance Festival, Madrid, and Los Lunes de La Fábrica, 2002), and electronic art festivals (Art Futura, 1997; Existencias Agotadas, 1999).

The collective has produced prints and videos, published the book Arte en las Redes (Anaya Multimedia, 1997), and organized an online competition during the Observatori 2000 festival.

Their website, libresparasiempre.net, serves as a platform for periodic open calls (e.g., Devorolor, las plantillas que devoran el olor. El Plantillazo, 2003) and as a gallery for their digital artworks, such as the illustrated alphabet ¡Libres, 2003.

In February 2013, an exhibition connected the group with a neopop movement that began with Luis Gordillo, continued through the Nueva Figuración Madrileña and its successors (e.g., Jaime Aledo, Elena Blasco), followed by Juan Ugalde, Patricia Gadea, and Estrujenbank, culminating with Libres Para Siempre themselves.

Their electronic artwork Composite was acquired by the MEIAC (Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo). The Museo del Barro in Asunción (Paraguay) includes works by the collective in its Spanish contemporary graphic art collection.

Despite working in a wide range of expressive media (painting, photography, performance, digital animation, video, virtual reality, and Net Art), Libres Para Siempre maintains a consistent formal and symbolic coherence. This is reflected in their recurring use of characters, settings, and a playful domestic irreverence across their body of work.

Viva el Paro, 1998. Lightbox, 90 x 120 cm.

This work was created by the collective Libres Para Siempre (LPS) for the exhibition
Pinturas paranormales, held at the Doble Espacio gallery in Madrid in 1998.

Doble Espacio was a gallery dedicated to multiple art, which included this artwork in its digital catalog alongside other works, such as paintings offered at multiple art prices, i.e., affordable prices. In that context, the collective expressed the following:

¨The collective offers original works cheaper than multiples because manual production costs less than mechanical production. In the end, the group finances its reproducible works through the non-reproducible ones, thus losing the added value enjoyed by unique works made by hand. This honesty with the buyer exposes the hypocritical stance of the alternative art market for multiple works, which offers cheaper artworks at the expense of the artist, who is usually the one financing the multiples, while making the public believe that the lower cost of the artwork lies in it not being unique¨.

The multiple art produced by Libres Para Siempre always reflected the technological moment the group was experiencing. This practice was driven by a vanguardist concern to connect art with the technological models of each era. This approach was termed by the group as advanced versions of painting, which they called Advanced Painting.

The path towards Advanced Painting was carried out using various programs. One of them was Animator Pro, an animation software released in 1989 by Autodesk under the license of Yost Group, created by Peter Kennard, Gary Yost, and Jim Ken. This program, which ran on MSDOS with a palette of 256 colors and whose native formats were FLI or FLC, was used in 1995 to create electronic works that the collective contributed to Pandora, a program by Simon Birrel. In Pandora, a digital museum was created—an illusory digital space where these works were exhibited in a conventional manner.

In 1996, during the exhibition Ciberchic (at Cruce), photographs of computer screens were presented alongside animations created with Animator Pro and virtual worlds designed with the Russian program Virtual Home Space Builder (VHSB). For this exhibition, the studio was relocated to the gallery space, where some videos were edited, allowing the audience to interact with the artists and observe their working methods.

In No hay nadie (Art Futura, 1997), plastic tarpaulins printed by mechanical injection were juxtaposed with virtual reality environments created with Virtual Home Space Builder (VHSB). This program allowed the design of 3D domestic spaces for integration into the emerging web, combining text, digital images, animations, digital video, sound, and hyperlinks. Moreover, with rapid rendering, these created worlds could be visualized in real- time.

The artwork Viva el paro, presented as a lightbox, takes advantage of all the digital resources acquired by the group. It was created in a moment of crisis in Spanish society, where, faced with brutal unemployment, the collectives best response was to continue creating art. Hence the slogan: ¡VIVA EL PARO! HIP HIP HOORAY LONG LIVE UNEMPLOYMENT!

With Viva el paro, the collective began developing its first website. Today, their digital space
is: www.libresparasiempre.net

Artwork in storage by the LaAgencia