December 2026
The Prado opens Mariana of Austria on 1 December, and Vermeer's View of Delft stays at the Thyssen into January. On Constitution Day, the 6th, entry is free all day at the Reina Sofía, where Minujín's fried-chicken maze runs. Matadero's LAB 5 closes on the 13th. Eight picks across eight venues.
Museo del PradoOpens 1 December
Atlas shoulders a globe bearing the boy king Charles II and his mother in Herrera the Younger's 1668 drawing. Around 100 works, Velázquez's Mariana from Dallas among them, trace how a queen regent built her public image.
Museo Thyssen-BornemiszaUntil 10 January
Vermeer's View of Delft hangs alone at the end of the route, one of 25 loans from The Hague. The Thyssen hangs its pictures beside them, so Honthorst's two violinists meet again. Time Out called it "small but extraordinary".
Museo Reina SofíaUntil 8 March
Eleven rooms run from a neon-lit street to a swamp, past a room that smells of fried chicken and a beauty salon in a giant woman's head that does your make-up. It reconstructs Minujín's 1965 Buenos Aires maze.
Espacio Fundación TelefónicaUntil 15 February
In VR you walk a night crossing of the US–Mexico border with migrants until a helicopter spotlight and armed agents with dogs arrive. The cast are real migrants telling their own stories; Iñárritu's piece won a special Oscar.
CaixaForum MadridUntil 23 May
The dollar-bill handbills for Mister Marshall were reported for counterfeiting at Cannes in 1953. They are among 220-plus pieces from Berlanga's private archive, laid out as one long tracking shot. AACA Digital called the staging "magistral".
Fundación MAPFRE – Sala RecoletosUntil 10 January
Elizabeth Siddal is usually the face in the painting; here she is one of 40 artists on the walls, alongside Julia Margaret Cameron and May Morris. Bonart says the show turns a fixed doctrine into "a field of tensions".
Palacio de VelázquezFree
Franco's yacht, the Azor, crushed into metal blocks. A bronze Tank Man the size of Michelangelo's David. Nearly 200 works by Fernando Sánchez Castillo pick apart monuments and the symbols of power.
Matadero MadridCloses 13 December
Martyna Marciniak has sewn the AI-generated "Balenciaga Pope" puffer as a real coat, glitches included. Elsewhere, four retired Ethereum mining rigs pick video clips by lottery. Medialab Matadero's group show tests how technology bends what counts as real.
Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San FernandoFree
Habsburg Madrid in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the court drew Velázquez, Cervantes, Lope de Vega and Vesalius to the heart of a global empire.
Matadero Madrid
A Medialab Matadero group show in Nave Una: unpublished, site-specific installations by five international artists probing how technology reshapes what counts as real.
Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando
Marks the 250th anniversary of the United States with a rare 1796 portrait of George Washington by Josef Perovani, shown beside Goya's portrait of Manuel Godoy.
Palacio de CristalFree
A printed tarp wrapping the Palacio de Cristal's glass facade during restoration, inspired by pre-Columbian Paracas funerary textile bundles.
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
The Mauritshuis and the Thyssen exchange 25 Dutch masterpieces, including Vermeers View of Delft, shown across the museums classical rooms.
Museo SorollaFree
The opening show of the new extension traces Sorolla's house from its 1905 design with architect Repullés to today, through paintings, drawings, plans, letters and photographs.
Fundación MAPFRE – Sala Recoletos
The first European retrospective of American photographer Minor White, marking 50 years since his death, covering nature, portraiture and his innovative photographic sequences.
Fundación Juan MarchFree
How Spanish audiences encountered modern and contemporary art from the 1960s to today, told through exhibitions, institutions and countercultural spaces.
Fundación MAPFRE – Sala Recoletos
A survey of over forty women artists linked to the Pre-Raphaelite movement, tracing their careers and creative paths through the Victorian era.
Fundación MAPFRE – Sala Recoletos
Traces how Hans Prinzhorn's collection of psychiatric-patient artwork influenced Expressionist, Dadaist and Surrealist artists, and its later revival as Art Brut by Jean Dubuffet.
Museo Cerralbo
A portrait of writer Emilia Pardo Bazán, on loan from A Coruña, spotlighting women who championed heritage preservation alongside the Marquis of Cerralbo.
Museo Arqueológico Nacional
A single showcase on childhood from prehistory to antiquity, through children's remains, everyday objects and toys, with Nancy dolls dressed in four ancient periods.
Museo del Prado
The first Prado show on Ricardo de Madrazo: sketchbooks, drawings and watercolours, from copies after old masters to orientalism, city views and intimate scenes.
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Retrospective of the East Village artist and urban art pioneer, with paintings, sculptures, installations and murals blending pop culture and surrealism.
Museo Nacional de Artes DecorativasFree
Artist Miguel Ángel Blanco closes his trilogy on remarkable materials with amber in its natural state, powder drawings, book-boxes and artistic pieces from Spanish collections.
Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales
An interdisciplinary look at feathers as cultural and symbolic material across world cultures, from historic featherwork to contemporary art by Henar Iglesias.
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Mapuche artist Seba Calfuqueos first European solo show, exploring the Cautin River through ceramics, video and embroidered paintings.
Matadero MadridFree
Carlos Aires transforms Nave 0, the slaughterhouse's fire-scarred former cold room, into a haunted dance floor of shored-up metal supports and some twenty screens, part of the Abierto x Obras site-specific series.
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Explores Salvador Dalis fascination with Sigmund Freud and their 1938 meeting, and how psychoanalysis shaped Dalis surrealist visual language.
Museo del Traje
A dialogue between Spanish fashion history and contemporary footwear: 35 showcases of the permanent collection paired with new shoe designs.
Museo del RomanticismoFree
Collage, poetry and graphic novels by the late Canarian queer artist Roberta Marrero, who reworked Romantic myths of the dandy and the damned from a trans perspective.
Museo Nacional de Artes DecorativasFree
Retrospective of jewellery designer Helena Rohner, Gold Medal for Fine Arts, spanning three decades of porcelain, wood and ceramic pieces set in precious metals.
Espacio Fundación Telefónica
Iñárritu's Oscar-honoured virtual reality installation: a solo, roughly 20-minute immersive walk through part of the journey of Mexican and Central American migrants.
Museo Reina Sofía
A centenary retrospective built around the visceral mixed-media works of Spanish Informalist painter Manolo Millares (1926-1972), exploring repression and human suffering through torn hessian and abstraction.
Museo del Prado
An itinerary of 30 works across the Villanueva building on civil engineering in the Prado's paintings, such as bridges, made with Fundación FHECOR.
Galería de las Colecciones Reales
Chests, caskets, coffers, trunks and cases from Patrimonio Nacional's royal palaces, monasteries and convents: centuries of furniture made to safeguard its contents.
Museo Arqueológico NacionalFree
Rare 15th-century arms and armour from a sealed room at Monreal de Ariza castle (Zaragoza): helmets, crossbows, a breastplate, a bell and artillery chambers.
Museo de Historia de MadridFree
The 40 winning photos of the museum's sixth photography contest, run with the Planetario de Madrid on the theme of Madrid's sky, in the Patio Dorado.
Museo del Prado
Marking the centenary of Rainer Maria Rilke's death, this show explores the poet's deep engagement with El Greco, Velázquez and Goya.
Museo del Prado
Two late Prado panels, Harmony (The Three Graces?) and The Ages of Woman and Death, set in the context of German Renaissance art and Cranach, with recent restoration findings.
CaixaForum Madrid
A 70-minute immersive audiovisual journey through biodiversity, produced with National Geographic and OASIS Immersive Studios, urging action to protect the natural world.
Museo Reina Sofía
Eli Cortiñas revisits her 2016 work on cinema, museums and colonial imagery, adding new AI-generated installations that critique how algorithms and institutions perpetuate power imbalances.
Museo Reina Sofía
A full-scale reconstruction of Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín 1965 immersive installation, alongside a survey of Minujín happenings and participatory actions from 1963-1985.
Palacio de VelázquezFree
A retrospective of over 200 works by Fernando Sánchez Castillo dismantling monuments and symbols of power, framed around the legend of a lost royal pearl.
Museo de América
Eva Lootz's video project on thread and weaving, from pre-Columbian textile cultures to the loom as forerunner of computing, with dancer Kike García Gil.
Museo Reina Sofía
Five decades of work by Colombian artist Miguel Ángel Rojas, spanning early installations on rural migration to contemporary pieces addressing narco-trafficking and Amazon exploitation.
Museo de América
Eduardo Longoni's photographs of Argentina from the 1976 military coup to 2003, marking 50 years since the coup, in the first-floor cloister.
Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales
Wildlife photography from the Spanish Society for Evolutionary Biology (SESBE) on habitat, coevolution, sexual selection, social evolution and the Anthropocene.
CaixaForum Madrid
An intimate, immersive look at filmmaker Luis Garcia-Berlanga (1921-2010), drawing on his newly catalogued personal archive of film, life and humour.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.
