At a glance

A contemporary art dialogue about one essential question: what does it really mean to create something new?

Why go

Because this is not a conventional collection show. 25 works from Afundación and 14 from the MAC are brought together for the first time, creating pairings based on visual affinity, shared themes and unexpected connections. Painting, sculpture, photography and audiovisual work are used to explore the idea that artistic innovation is not simply about novelty, but about finding a new language for looking at the world.

You'll see

39 works · Contemporary Spanish and Galician art · Painting · Sculpture · Photography · Audiovisual art · Cross-collection dialogues · Personal artistic languages · Recent decades of Spanish art

Pace of visit

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.

Don't miss

The conversations between works from different collections. The curatorial interest is not simply identifying individual artists, but noticing why two pieces have been placed together — whether through subject, formal language, material or attitude toward experimentation. Also keep Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s phrase in mind: “The duty of the new is the principal duty of every creative artist.” It provides the conceptual key to the entire exhibition.

Artlovers Tip

Don’t visit it looking for one single masterpiece.

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.

Inside the exhibition

Description

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 travelling for?

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.

Experience as an Artlover

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.

Exhibition

El deber de lo nuevo

Contemporary Art
PaintingSculpture

Artlovers relevance

Approx 1 hour

Plan your visit

Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC)

Madrid, Spain

4.3· 850 reviews

Hours & rating from Google

Madrid, Spain

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