Art at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid

Over the weekend I visited Madrid, we saw lots of the tourist sites, and sampled some excellent tapas but my highlight was our visit to the Reina Sofia museum.

This museum is most famous for housing the Picasso painting Guernica The picture is very large, 3.50 x 7.80 metres, and takes up one whole wall of the museum! People were surrounding the picture – adding to the spectacle! For me the painting is striking not only because of its size but also because of the emotion and despair it shows. I think it really makes you think about the effect of the war upon Spain.

The painting unlike many of Picasso´s works just uses black and white. It portrays the horror of the Spanish civil war, during which planes bombed and destroyed the town of Guernica. There are lots of contorted shapes in the picture and I think you really can see the suffering in it.

In the same part of the museum there are propaganda posters, photos and paintings done by other artists, which all portray the civil war. These help to contextualize the Guernica painting.

However the Reina Sofia museum is pretty big – there are four floors - so there is a lot more to see than just the Guernica exhibition. I most enjoyed one of the temporary photography exhibition by Hans Peter Feldmann called very simply “una exposición de arte”. It was a lot more cheerful (and colourful) than the civil war paintings!

We went to the Reina Sofia museum on a Sunday when the entry was free. The museum also doesn´t charge entry in the evenings after 7pm or on Saturday afternoons, but if your visit doesn´t coincide with any of these times its still worth a look. 

If you are visiting Madrid then I would definitely recommend you make at least one visit to this museum!