A bold rehang at the Reina Sofía turns the spotlight on Spain’s half-century of rapid upheaval, beginning with a stark image of restraint. The opening centerpiece, Document No … (1975) by Juan Genovés, shows a detained man seated, head lowered, wrists shackled, awaiting a capricious decision from the state apparatus. Painted in the year Franco died and Spain began its delicate shift toward democracy, this figure — anonymous, ordinary, powerless — serves as a natural entry point for an exhibition tracing fifty years of contemporary art.
Across 403 carefully chosen works, the museum’s curators map how artists from Spain and beyond have chronicled and responded to social and historical transformations. They illuminate a period from the exuberant creative burst following the dictatorship’s end to the AIDS crisis, from second-wave feminism to rising environmental awareness, from decolonization to the spike in global terrorism.
Ángeles González-Sinde, who chairs the Reina Sofía’s board, describes the rehang not as a mere reshuffling but as a critical reinterpretation. It aims to situate artistic practice within the social, political, and cultural processes that have shaped these five decades. Remarkably, nearly two-thirds of the works in the new Contemporary Art: 1975 to the Present collection, housed on the museum’s fourth floor, have never before been shown as part of the permanent collection.
“More than a reorganization of exhibitions, this is a contextual conversation,” she told reporters. The show pairs internationally recognized figures with works that chart Spain’s rapidly evolving society. Exiled Argentine photographer Carlos Bosch captures pivotal moments of the Transition, including Spain’s first gay pride march in 1977. José Pérez Ocaña, a queer activist, uses altar-like installations to subvert the region’s popular Catholic rituals.
The display also features jewelry by Chus Burés, whose pieces adorned two Pedro Almodóvar films and symbolize the wild energy of Madrid’s Movida—the post-Franco underground culture that is as renowned for its creativity as for its excesses.
The darker side of Movida is represented by Iván Zulueta’s 1979 arthouse horror Arrebato (Rapture) and by Alberto García-Alix’s stark photography. One standout piece, García-Alix’s 1988 En ausencia de Willy (Willy’s Absence), shows a western shirt once owned by the artist’s dead brother who died from a heroin overdose in the 1980s epidemic. Paired with a pencil sketch of Willy, the work powerfully remembers a decade when, in García-Alix’s words, “nothing was enough.”
The AIDS era is addressed in multiple ways, including Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of mummified figures in Palermo’s catacombs, which eerily foreshadow the disease’s later toll on his circle. Pepe Miralles’s Ajuares (Funerary Offerings) collects ordinary objects linked to illness and treatment in a large glass cabinet — antiretrovirals, Prozac, gauze, syringes, pajamas, and soft toys — provoking reflections on care, fear, and mortality.
Manuel Segade, the Reina Sofía’s director, emphasizes that the 403 works are meant to sustain a dialogue among past, present, and future. The goal, he explains, isn’t to present a single definitive narrative but to keep it open, to invite ongoing dialogue and future reinterpretations so the collection remains alive and revisitable.
The three-year reorganization is driven by a simple aim: help every visitor understand the breadth, quality, and discursive potential of Spain’s contemporary art and its broader cultural significance.
Culture Minister Ernest Urtasun frames the project as a meditation on 1975 as a turning point, while also raising bigger questions about society, art, and democracy. In today’s climate, he argues, those reflections are as vital as they were fifty years ago — beginning with Genovés’s portrait of aspiration and the ways contemporary art has shaped, and continues to shape, democratic values and Enlightenment ideals.
But here’s where it gets controversial: as the museum foregrounds a broad, inclusive narrative, some critics may question whether the selection overemphasizes certain voices or periods at the expense of others. Does the rehang truly balance international perspectives with a robust reckoning of Spain’s domestic art scene, or does it privilege legacies that are easier to display and interpret for contemporary audiences? And this is the part many readers might wonder about: how should a national museum curate a living history that is still being written, debated, and felt in real time? If you have a view, share it in the comments: do you think this approach illuminates Spain’s recent past, or would a differing framework offer a more complete picture?
