The season opens with a lively blend of offerings, spotlighting Pablo Picasso alongside trusted names such as Paul Klee, Manolo Quejido, and Italian Renaissance masters. The Malaga-born genius takes center stage with three exhibitions this autumn, marking his death fifty years ago in 2023.
Picasso heats up the schedule
Leading museums in Barcelona and Madrid prepare to honor Picasso with a robust slate of events. The Picasso Museum in Barcelona, the Mapfre Foundation, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum will host a wide-ranging program in 2023 that includes forty exhibitions, two congresses, and numerous activities across Europe and North America.
The Catalan museum centers its attention on the artist himself. A focused examination of Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, a pivotal promoter of cubism and a throughline in Picasso’s career, inaugurates the year with a major retrospective.
Mapfre explores the dynamic between the Malaga painter and Julio González, illustrating how their Paris collaboration helped spark a new form of iron sculpture that influenced mid-20th-century art.
Meanwhile, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum opens its doors to Picasso in October, pairing him with Coco Chanel. The exhibition investigates how cubism intersected with fashion and how the two luminaries collaborated on various occasions.
Spaniards in the Renaissance
Picasso is not the sole focus. The Prado Museum places a bold emphasis on 16th-century Italian art with a show titled The Discovery of the Renaissance: Spanish Artists in Naples at the Dawn of the Cinquecento, opening in October.
This stands as one of the year’s most ambitious exhibitions, presented in expansive volumes. It traces Spanish artists who settled in Naples, then part of the Spanish realm, during the 16th century and who absorbed the radical art changes Rome had begun. The display weaves in figures such as Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo.
Contemporary art finds a home within the classics this fall with a survey dedicated to Fernando Zóbel, founder of Cuenca’s Abstract Art movement. He painted for hours in his rooms, and the November exhibition presents notebooks he drew during museum visits.
25 years of the Guggenheim
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao marks a 25th anniversary with a substantial presentation of its permanent collection, spread across the museum. The display unfolds along three thematic threads, offering visitors a panoramic view of holdings acquired since the museum’s inception. An installation by Yayoi Kusama features prominently in the gallery spaces.
Unknown and blessed
Reina Sofía centers its fall programming on lesser-known figures. A first European monograph in October sheds light on the versatile Margarita Azurdia, a Guatemalan artist who lived from 1931 to 1998, alongside an examination of Francesc Tosquelles, a psychiatrist who studied medical experiments in the visual arts.
The show also traces the path of Seville-born Manolo Quejido (b. 1946) with a comprehensive survey, The Immeasurable Distance, opening in October, and a photography strand titled Documentary Genealogies, highlighting works from 1848 to 1917.
The Miró Foundation presents Paul Klee and the Secrets of Nature in October, a major survey of the German-Swiss artist. The exhibition foregrounds the wonder he felt when observing the natural world and pairs his works with pieces by women artists who pursued similar questions but received less recognition.
Women in photography
The Mapfre Foundation’s KBr and Foto Colectania present a study in Barcelona in October of Carrie Mae Weems’s photography across forty years, tracing themes of gender, race, class, and politics through a critical lens that remains timely.
Mapfre also opens a window into the universe of photographer Ilse Bing in September, a Bauhaus-trained artist who navigated Paris and the United States between the wars. Her complex life and relatively brief career contributed more than 200 images that travel to Spain for the first time in this exhibition.
New comics
Comics and illustration receive special attention this season. A show titled Comics: Dreams and History at Barcelona CaixaForum charts the evolution of the genre, while the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture joins nine rising graphic novelists who redefined the local scene with their Graphic Constellation in December.
In a separate thread, six mummies from Ancient Egypt are presented in Mummies: Rediscovering Six Lives, a collaboration with the British Museum housed within the CaixaForum in Barcelona.