The exhibitions that will stand out in 2025

Museums and foundations throughout Spain are planning a year, 2025, that pays special attention to women and their role in the art world, both as artists and creators, as well as promoters and artistic patrons. The German expressionist, Gabriele Münter, stands out; the Brazilian modernist painter Tarsila do Amaral, the abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler, the American Barbara Kruger or the Bilbao-born, Marisa González, a multimedia artist, pioneer in the use of new technologies.
In Barcelona, where two classic names in the history of art stand out: Zurbarán and Rubens. The National Museum of Contemporary Art of Catalonia (MNAC) will open 'Zurbarán (super)natural' in March, in which the three versions of 'The Vision of Saint Francis by Pope Nicholas V' will be on display, a masterpiece by the 17th century painter, the Spanish Golden Age, Francisco de Zurbarán.

At CaixaForum, 'Rubens and the Flemish Baroque Artists', with works and objects from the lesser-known collections of the Prado Museum in Madrid, showcasing Rubens' unrivalled creativity, his influence and the aesthetic renewal he promoted, are the focus of this exhibition, in which his paintings dialogue with those of artists such as Van Dyck, Jordaens and Brueghel. (from 29 May to 21 September). Peter Paul Rubens was the driving force of a creative force that conquered Europe in the 17th century. His large compositions, filled with an almost violent dynamism and the almost palpable sensuality transmitted by his work, define Baroque painting. His powerful personality - like that of his work - ensured him patronage and a position in the diplomacy of the Spanish court, of Philip IV and his aunt, Isabel Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain who was sovereign and governor of the Netherlands for a whopping 35 years.

Around 60 pieces that make up the exhibition, including The Birth of Apollo and Diana, The Death of Seneca or The Immaculate Conception, come from the Prado Museum. The collection reveals the powerful intellectual charge as well as the style that marked the production of Rubens and his Flemish contemporaries.

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA), in its 30th anniversary, will show a permanent collection that invites us to reflect on the representativeness of the oldest pieces in the catalogue that will coincide with another very different exhibition, the exhibition 'Project a black planet. The art and culture of Pan-Africa'.

In Madrid, the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum, has as its protagonist 'Marina Vargas: Revelations', a journey of women in art, in imagery and sacred narrative, with which it seeks to break their invisibility in the history of art. (from February to May).

The Museum will recover a classic face of literature in the exhibition 'Proust and the Arts', which will portray the important role that art had in the work of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Marcel Proust (Auteuil, 1871). Literature, philosophy and art theory were the fields where his influence was brought. Aesthetics was always very present in his books: special environments, landscapes and even contemporary or past artists were very decisive. An exhibition that highlights the link between art and literature.

The museum continues for two months this year with the first retrospective of the Berlin painter, Gabriele Münter outside Germany. A tour of the artist's work through 145 paintings, photographs and drawings. A tribute to her career that begins with self-portraits and travels to the United States, where she learned about the origins of her parents, German immigrants. In 1901 she began to study at the Academy of Fine Arts where she met Kandinsky, her teacher and partner. In Paris, she immersed herself in the post-impressionism of Van Gogh, Gauguin, the Fauves and Matisse, an influence that always permeates her work: "We were interested in being able to delve deeper into the only German expressionist artist we had in the collection," says the curator, Marta Ruiz del Árbol, who highlights "Münter's originality and independence, ignoring previous interpretations that subordinated her work to that of Kandinsky."

And in October, "Warhol, Pollock and other American spaces" is scheduled, an exhibition that brings together the work of these two key names in 20th century art, joined by other artists who in the same period rethink problems related to new spatial strategies. Two complex figures, apparently very different, but united, like a whole generation of artists, by their concerns about the path, the spatial and large formats.

Warhol's obsession with having a Pollock work for his extensive art collection is well known, as is the relationship between his famous series of car crashes and the accident that ended Pollock's life in 1956. "An exhibition in which we will discover that neither Pollock was always an 'abstract master' nor Andy Warhol only the artist occupied with banal, mass themes, both represented dispassionately," says the museum.

At the Museo Centro Reina Sofía, the Madrid Contemporary Art Centre, 'En el aire conmovido...' is the highlight of an exhibition curated by the French philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman that invites us to reflect on the connection between human emotions and political dynamics through the eyes of Federico García Lorca's Romancero gitano. Works of art, documents and poems make up a tour that promises "a unique emotional and intellectual experience" in the words of the gallery. "The exhibition proposes a complex political anthropology of emotion in a poetic key." The exhibition vindicates the utopian and emancipatory power of emotions understood as a force capable of leading to a transformative collective commotion," summarizes its curator. (From May 28 to September 8).

From May 21, the Reina Sofía exhibits a retrospective of the multimedia artist from Bilbao, Marisa González, winner of the Velázquez Prize 2023, activist and feminist, pioneer in the use of new technologies in art since the 1970s, who critically deals with gender violence or industrial dismantling.

As for the exhibitions at the Museo Nacional del Prado, those started in 2024 continue, which will continue during the initial part of 2025, such as the tribute to Joaquín Sorolla for the centenary of his death, which is shown in the mammoth building of the Royal Collections Gallery (between the Almudena and the Royal Palace). Without forgetting the new exhibition itinerary created by the gardener and botanical researcher, Eduardo Barba Gómez, who proposes an approach to his permanent collection that shows how botany is a relevant part of painting.

From end to end: from Bilbao to Malaga.

We go to the north of Spain, to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which will offer a programme entirely led by women: the Brazilian modernist painter Tarsila do Amaral, the American abstract expressionist Helen Frankenthaler, the American Barbara Kruger and the Portuguese artist, Helena Vieira da Silva, one of the pioneers of geometric abstraction.

The artistic focus also looks south, towards the Picasso Museum in Malaga, where two exhibitions stand out: 'Picasso: The Royan Notebooks', which opens on January 31 and brings together the eight notebooks of pencil and ink drawings that the Malaga native made between 1939 and August 1940. And in November: 'Picasso. Memory and Desire', a reflection on images and their relationship with the future of the modern subject, both in his work and in that of his contemporaries.

And as every year, Madrid is preparing to host the international contemporary art fair ARCO, which in its 44th edition will have the Amazon as its central project and will feature more than 200 galleries, in addition to its usual sections: new galleries and Latin American art.
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