Exhibitions for 2025

The year has begun and we must already look ahead. 2025 promises to be very intense in terms of the visual arts. Museums, foundations, fairs and galleries from all over Spain trace a journey through the history of art, from Zurbarán to Rubens, passing through the latest contemporary developments in a new edition of ARCO dedicated to the Amazon, and in a year that pays special attention to women and celebrates important anniversaries at the Fundació Miró, the MACBA and Tabakalera.
Madrid is preparing to host its long-awaited international contemporary art fair ARCO from March 5 to 9, which will celebrate its 44th edition with the Amazon as its central project and will feature more than 200 galleries, as well as two curated sections of new galleries and Latin American art.
Between March and June, the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum will be bringing back a classic face of literature with the exhibition "Proust and the Arts", which will portray the importance that art had in the work of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Marcel Proust. Between February and May, visitors will also be able to enjoy "Marina Vargas: Revelations", a journey through women in the history of art, in imagery and sacred narrative, which seeks to break their silence.
Also on the subject of great female artists, the Reina Sofía Museum also highlights "Huguette Caland. A life in a few lines", which from 19 February will show the first major retrospective in Europe of the Lebanese artist, whose life and work represented a constant challenge to the aesthetic, social and sexual conventions of her time.
Likewise, from May 21, the Reina Sofía will host the exhibition "Retrospective of Marisa González", which explores the work of the Bilbao artist, winner of the Velázquez Prize in 2023, at the intersections between artistic creation and image reproduction and communication technologies. The Prado Museum's exhibitions for 2025 are, for the moment, those that started in 2024 and will continue for a few months in the new year.
Barcelona awaits the arrival of the exhibition "Painting the sky. 50 years of stories from the Fundació Miró", which will officially open on June 10 to commemorate the half-century since the opening of the museum on the Monjuïc mountain, an exhibition that will address key moments in the history of the entity and the reference center for Miró art.
Among the Barcelona galleries, classic names such as Zurbarán and Rubens stand out in 2025. The National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) will open in March "Zurbarán (super)natural", where you can see the three versions of "The Vision of Saint Francis by Pope Nicholas V", the masterpiece of the Spanish Golden Age painter, Francisco de Zurbarán.
On the other hand, Caixaforum will exhibit between May and September in the exhibition "Rubens and the artists of the Flemish Baroque" works and objects from the lesser-known collections of the Prado Museum, which show the unrivalled creativity of Pedro Pablo Rubens, his influence and the aesthetic renewal that he promoted in dialogue with works by artists such as Van Dyck, Jordaens or Brueghel.
The Tàpies Museum will open in February "Antoni Tàpies. The Imagination of the World", a project that delves into the creation of the imagination of the Barcelona native, which began to take shape when, being ill, very young, in his bed he read and listened to music like never before, a legacy that did not abandon him and that took shape in his creations.
Finally, there is the 30th anniversary exhibition of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA), where there will be a permanent collection that invites us to reflect on the representativeness of the oldest pieces in the catalogue and how these are reinterpreted and dialogue with the latest acquisitions; in parallel, the exhibition 'Project a black planet. The art and culture of Pan-Africa' will be presented.
The artistic focus is also on the Picasso Museum in Malaga, where two exhibitions on the work of the genius from Figueres stand out in the exhibition programme for the year 2025. The first of these, 'Picasso: The Royan Notebooks', which will open on 31 January, brings together the eight notebooks of pencil and ink drawings that the Malaga-born artist made between September 1939 and August 1940 in this French city.
The other exhibition, which will be the final touch to the museum's displays, will be, starting on November 14, "Picasso. Memory and desire", which aims to reflect on the system of images and their relationship with the development of the modern subject in the work of the artist from Malaga and his contemporaries.
The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao will offer, for its part, an all-female programme with four exhibitions of female artists: the Brazilian modernist painter Tarsila do Amaral, the American abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler, the North American artist Barbara Kruger and the illusionist Maria Helena Vieira da Silva.
In San Sebastián, the highlight will be the double exhibition of Tabakalera and the Kursaal by Maider López starting in October, with a retrospective of the work produced by the artist in the last ten years, taking advantage of the tenth anniversary of Tabakalera as a centre for artistic creation.
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