Featured Artists in Madrid's Reina Sofia Museum

Visit this Modernism Art Hub Housing 20th Century Collections

Oct 1, 2009

The Reina Sofía Museum focuses mainly on Spanish art with extensive collections from popular artists such as Spanish artists Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali.

The Reina Sofía Museum is the perfect place to spend a day immersed in visual art. It has four floors to house a huge variety of creative pieces, catering something special for everyone..

The museum, officially named Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) was inaugurated in 1992 and named for Queen Sofia of Spain, is conveniently located at the southern end of the “Golden Triangle of Art” located along the Paseo del Prado which also includes the Museo del Prado and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza.

Get to Know the Artists

Some well known artists featured other than Picasso and Dali include Juan Gris, Joan Miró, Julio González, Eduardo Chillida, Antoni Tàpies, Pablo Gargallo, Lucio Muñoz, Luis Gordillo, Jorge Oteiza, José Gutiérrez Solana and many more.

There are not many foreign artists, but The Sofia (Museo Reina Sofía, Queen Sofia Museum and El Reina Sofia are other informal names) has works by Robert Delaunay, Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, Jacques Lipchitz, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, cubist still-lifes by Georges Braque and a large work by Francis Bacon.

The most popular stopping point in the museum is Picasso’s huge 349cm x 776 painting “Guernica” depicting Guernica in Spain being bombed by German and Italian warplanes during the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Republican government commissioned Picasso to create this large mural for the Spanish display at the Paris International Exposition in the 1937 World's Fair in Paris.

A One-Stop Spot for Visual Art

The Reina Sofia also has a free-access library with a collection of over 100,000 books, 3,500 sound recordings and almost 1,000 videos. Its library has two reading rooms for visitors to view library collections and documentaries and most are available for free. Guests can find artists’ monographs, thematic papers and reference books. The automated catalog (OPAC) can be accessed on computers where visitors can consult audiovisual materials.

The central building of the museum was an 18th century hospital and thorough modern renovations and additions to the old building started in 1980. An 8000 m2 (86,000 ft2) expansion costing €92 million designed by French architect Jean Nouvel opened on October 2005.

The Reina Sofia offers visitors a myriad of unforgettable visual art and art lovers can also drop by Museo del Prado and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza which are all within walking distance from the museum.

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