Fall brings major exhibitions back to Madrid, including a freeexhibition that will bring together works by Wassily Kandinsky alongside pieces by Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, and other key figures in modern and contemporary art. The exhibition, titled *The Aesthetic Transition: Spain, 1960–2020*, will open on October 16, 2026, and will explore how international art gradually arrived and took root in our country over the course of six decades, from the historical avant-garde movements to Pop Art and Conceptual Art.
The Aesthetic Transition: Spain, 1960–2020 is not a classic retrospective of any major figure in art, but rather a research-based exhibition on the reception of modern art in Spain. Through various case studies of institutions, galleries, collections, and historical exhibitions, the show will document how, beginning in the 1960s, an artistic landscape gradually took shape—one that did not begin to rival that of other European countries until well into the 1980s.
Thirty artists, from Kandinsky to Warhol
The exhibition will bring together works by some thirty artists from both halves of the 20th century. Among them is Wassily Kandinsky, a central figure in abstraction and a bridge between the historical avant-garde movements and the non-figurative art that later took root in Spain. Also featured is Henri Matisse, whose influence can be traced in the use of color and pictorial composition by several generations of Spanish artists, and who was the subject of this year’s major exhibition “Chez Matisse” in Madrid, featuring works on loan from the Centre Pompidou.
Marcel Duchamp, a symbol of the conceptual turn, could not be left out; his reception in Spain was linked to pioneering exhibitions and the gradual incorporation of the ready-made and Duchampian thought into the local art scene. Also featured are Constantin Brancusi, Paul Klee, Robert Motherwell, John Cage, and Andy Warhol, representing different moments in which international modernity engaged in dialogue with Spanish art.
The collection will serve as a map of influences: works that have rarely been seen together in Madrid, organized not merely to tell the artists’ stories, but to tell the story of how Spain has viewed and assimilated them.