Featured Events in Madrid in October, 2025 (May Updated)

The Palacio de Cristal has traditionally been a space where artists are commissioned to work on a new piece conceived specifically for its unique architecture. Although the restoration and repair work currently being carried out on its structure means visitors cannot access its interior, the programme held within to support the public display of current art continues all the same. In fact, it is the radical imagination of artists that will enable the Museo Reina Sofía to continue to endow this emblematic space with cultural content. The first such artist to take part in this series is Miguel Ángel Tornero (Baeza, 1978), who contributes with a work devised for the canvases which will cover the building during its first year of restoration work.

The work of Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa (Guatemala City, Guatemala, 1978) fuses sculptural installation, video and performance to open a reflection on his own biography and on his country’s turbulent history, marked by different forms of violence and armed conflict. Ramírez-Figueroa’s practice draws from Latin American political activism and experimental theatre, calling into question established and entrenched narratives which have emerged on specific episodes in the recent past. Through the physicality of bodies and staged environments that envisage fantasy and reality, the artist revisits his own traumas and those of a country shaped by colonial extractivism, civil war and the social imbalance of the Indigenous population.

Every year, Madrid hosts a military parade to mark Spain's National Day, a day that honors the expansion of Spanish culture and language beyond the European continent. The Armed Forces, Civil Guard, National Police, and maritime rescue services take part in the parade, along with displays of ground vehicles and aircraft. The event kicks off with the arrival of the King and Queen, who reviews the troops and greets members of the government. Other highlights of the parade include a paratrooper descending with a giant Spanish flag, the Spanish Legion marching with their pet goats, a solemn flag-raising ceremony to honor those who have died in service to their country, and a flypast by the Spanish Air Force.

Andy Warhol's fascination with Jackson Pollock is well known; his obsession with having one of his works in his extensive art collection, as well as the relationship between his famous car crash series and the notorious accident that ended Pollock's life one night in August 1956. The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza is organising an exhibition which brings together the work of these two key names of 20th century art, shown alongside that of other artists who were reconsidering issues relating to the new spatial strategies at this same time. These are two extraordinarily complex figures, seemingly very different but in fact united, like an entire generation of artists, by their interest in change, spatial issues and a fascination with large formats. The present opportunity to see the works in the galleries of the exhibition reveals that Jackson Pollock was not always an “abstract master”, nor was Warhol an artist solely occupied with dispassionate depictions of banal themes from popular culture. While maintaining figuration, in their own way both proposed revisiting the concept of space and its use as a place of concealment; both overturned the notion of the background and the figure, and both focused on an artistic project involving pictorial strategies which served them as camouflage. This exhibition project, which can be seen as autobiographical to some extent, focuses on two artists who worked on repetition, seriality and the move towards abstraction as a means to finding a place in the world in which they lived.

The Thyssen Bornemisza National Museum presents a selection of fifty masterpieces by Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee that belonged to the German dealer and collector Heinz Berggruen and are now part of the Berggruen Museum in Berlin. Heinz Berggruen (Berlin, 1914 - Paris, 2007) opened in 1950 a legendary art gallery in Paris, specializing in modern art, which for three decades had a prestigious clientele, including his friend Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza. From 1980, Berggruen devoted himself exclusively to expanding his select personal collection of 20th-century works and managed to assemble an extraordinary set that would be acquired by the German government in 2000. When the Museum Berggruen was created in the Charlottenburg neighborhood, as part of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the collector saw fulfilled his aspiration not only to preserve most of his works together for posterity, but also to be able to share his collection with the general public. In a way, this is a case similar to the one starring in Madrid by Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza a decade earlier. On the occasion of the renovation of its building, the Berggruen Museum has been organizing since 2022 a series of international exhibitions in Asia, Japan and China, and more recently in Europe, to show different proposals from the highlights of its collection. In the case of the presentation at the Thyssen Museum, the exhibition discourse proposes a constructive visual and intellectual dialogue between Heinz Berggruen's two favorite artists: Pablo Picasso and Paul Klee.