El deber de lo nuevo
A contemporary art dialogue about one essential question: what does it really mean to create something new?

ArtLovers Tip
A smart Madrid stop: free, thoughtful and very Artlovers — an exhibition about contemporary art as freedom, risk and the need to keep looking differently. And keep Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s sentence in your head: the duty of the new. Ask yourself which works still feel genuinely new — and why.
Exhibition Highlights - What you'll see
This exhibition brings together the Colección de Arte Afundación and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Madrid in a dialogue around the idea of “the new.” The title comes from Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s statement: “El deber de lo nuevo es el principal deber de todo artista creador.”
The show includes 39 works: 25 from the Afundación collection and 14 from the MAC collection, with painting, sculpture, photography and audiovisual pieces. The artists explore innovation not as fashion, but as attitude: new languages, personal aesthetics, creative freedom and different ways of looking at the present.
Among the artists included are Soledad Sevilla, Daniel Canogar, Pamen Pereira, Eduardo Arroyo, Alberto García-Alix, Susy Gómez, Leopoldo Nóvoa, Manuel Vilariño, Antón Lamazares, Menchu Lamas, Antón Patiño, Broto and Alfonso Albacete, among others.
Worth the trip
Because “the new” is not just a modern obsession — it is one of the driving forces of art.
This exhibition is interesting because it does not present contemporary art as isolated works, but as relationships: affinities, echoes, tensions and unexpected conversations between two collections. It also gives visibility to the Colección de Arte Afundación, considered the most important private collection of contemporary Galician art, with more than 5,000 works and declared Bien de Interés Cultural by the Xunta de Galicia in 2015.
How to experience it
Don’t visit it looking for one single masterpiece.
Visit it as a conversation. Look for pairings, resonances and contrasts: colour with colour, abstraction with figuration, irony with intimacy, technology with memory. The best part is not only each individual work, but how the works start speaking to each other.
Visit time / Density: Medium-density exhibition. With 39 works, it can be visited in around 45–60 minutes. If you like reading labels and comparing the dialogue between both collections, give it closer to 75 minutes.

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