Even covered in scaffolding, the Crystal Palace remains an atypical cultural enclave in the city. Now the protagonist is the canvas that envelops it during its restoration, which since yesterday has been a great work of contemporary art. The building is dressed in Fardo, an installation by Peruvian artist Andrea Canepa that transforms the glass icon into a huge textile package measuring 1,000 square meters, full of colors and layers, visible from all the walkways surrounding the pond.
The artist was inspired by the funeral bundles of the pre-Columbian culture of Paracas (Peru), sets of fabrics that wrapped the deceased in multiple layers of cloth. The canvas that now covers the palace functions as a giant urban bundle: as visitors walk around the building, the printed images show a cycle of fabrics that are tied, unfolded, and closed again, in a loop that can only be understood by walking around the monument.
A pre-Columbian “bundle” enveloping the Retiro
Andrea Canepa conceives the palace as a “contemporary praxinoscope”: each piece of canvas acts as a frame, and the movement is provided by the public, who activate the narrative as they move around. The result is a work that replaces the usual transparency of the Palace.
Editorial credit: Reina Sofía Museum
This is the second time that the construction canvas of the Crystal Palace has been used as an exhibition space, after Miguel Ángel Tornero’s Gran friso in 2025, but it is the first time that it has been used with such a narrative textile display.
The piece occupies an area of around 1,000 square meters and will remain visible throughout 2026, while repair work continues, keeping the Palace closed until at least 2027. Far from being a simple aesthetic “patch,” the intervention integrates art and public works.
The director of the Reina Sofía Museum, Manuel Segade, emphasizes that the project is part of a line of work that aims to “take advantage of the renovation process itself as an exhibition space,” inviting artists to intervene on the tarpaulins and engage in dialogue with the physical transformation of the palace. In Canepa’s own words, wrapping the building is a way of accompanying it “in its transition from an old stage to a new one,” in the same way that shrouds accompanied the body in its passage to the afterlife.