Manuel Segade delivers a lecture on the new presentation of the Collections. Collection. Contemporary art: 1975–present 

• The Museo Reina Sofía director analyses the new rehang of the Collections across Floor 4, the first phase of a project of rearrangement and improved gallery space to facilitate public access to the Museo’s holdings.  
• The initiative will continue in 2027 with the opening of Floor 3 and in 2028 with Floor 2, in a project that will see the entire Collection housed in the Sabatini Building. 
• Admission will be free, until full capacity is reached.  

With this lecture Manuel Segade enhances the aim of publicly disseminating narratives produced from the Museo, a phase in which the Collections are under constant revision. The new presentation of the Collections, open to the public since 18 February, occupies Floor 4 of the Sabatini Building, stretching across more than 3,000 square metres. This linear, but not always chronological, exhibition route extends across twenty-one chapters on the contemporary art history of the last fifty years from Spain.   

The talk begins with a prologue encompassing the affects, material culture and institutionalism of the Spanish Transition to democracy, the starting point of three routes with time periods that repeatedly circle back to the 1970s and where geographical spaces are not a closed context but a place of crossovers and transit for cultural manifestations. 

In the first route, A History of Affect in Contemporary Art, the generative powers of affects in art-making are considered, as are their role as both private experiences and political and social forces that give form to art and serve to reconstruct ties in times of crisis. The second, The Powers of Fiction: Sculpture, New Materialisms and Relational Aesthetics, is a sculptural gallery in which artworks physically co-exist in the same space as the visitor, breaking down barriers between fiction and reality. The third route, The Institution, the Market and the Art that Transends Both, reflects, for the first time, the Museo’s genealogy, the momentum of the first video-graphic artworks, the explosion of new figuration in Spanish painting and the role of art and reality in photographic cultures in the 1980s, as well as different manifestations of contemporary art with approaches taken from political and theoretical positions inside the framework of the critique of representation, Afro identity, and gender practices in more recent decades.    

The rehang comprises over 400 works by 224 artists, throwing into relief Spain’s artistic landscape and the strong presence of women. Over half of the works were previously unexhibited — not displayed among the Reina’s Collections — with many purchased in the last two years.