La transición estética proposes that Spain experienced not only the famous political Transition, but a much longer transformation in taste, visual culture and artistic freedom. Its story begins around 1960, when international modern and contemporary art was still arriving in Spain significantly later than elsewhere in Western Europe, and continues through 2020.

Rather than presenting sixty years as a conventional chronology of movements and artists, the exhibition focuses on the act of exhibiting itself. Which artworks reached Spain? Who decided to show them? Where were they seen? How did museums, galleries and alternative spaces influence what audiences understood as “modern” or “contemporary” art?

Works, documents and audiovisual material reconstruct a cultural ecosystem that changed enormously. Public and private institutions, commercial galleries and countercultural initiatives gradually filled what the Fundación Juan March describes as an initially sparse institutional landscape, particularly before the expansion of Spain's museum infrastructure from the 1980s onward.

The result is therefore also a history of the audience. Art does not change only because artists make something new; it changes when societies become capable of seeing, debating and eventually accepting what once appeared radical.

There is deliberately no single artist at the centre. Around thirty artists from different moments of the twentieth century are expected to appear alongside documentary material.

International figures including Vasily Kandinsky, Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, Paul Klee, Robert Motherwell, John Cage and Andy Warhol help reconstruct how successive forms of modernism and the avant-garde entered Spanish cultural consciousness.