Collections

A museum’s collections are the structural nerve centre around which the other messages transmitted by the institution reverberate. The Museo Reina Sofía collections have been taking shape since the foundation of the Museo Español de Arte Contemporáneo in 1894 to unify, over one hundred years later, the state collections of modern and contemporary art. The Collection is made up of 25,000 pieces spanning from the final decades of the nineteenth century to the present, and focusing both on the history of Spanish art and international art, with a particular emphasis on Latin America.    

The Museo’s Collection is being fully reconstructed and rehung in a process due to conclude in 2028, with the works being relocated to the upper floors of the Sabatini Building with a view to improving the circulation of visitors and enhance readings of the spaces inside the Museo. These rearrangements adhere to a criterion in which narratives are multiplied in a chorus that gives rise to multiple voices.    

In this opening of narratives, the dialectal forms of institutional language and the vernacular forms of art history must be accommodated not only as readings which break from notions of one art belonging to the elite and another for the masses, but more importantly within a diverse Spanish State with the multicultural value contributed by historical communities in its territory.  

A collection is the present perfect and past future and indispensable within it is the past. Opposite the linear temporality of conventional history, there are other temporary modalities which must allow narratives of presentation to be expanded upon. The importance of generational discrepancy, of building a contradictory and strategic continuity by virtue of anachronisms, will allow the horizon of consensus to be extended on narratives of art history from Spain.