Latest Events in Madrid(August Updated)

The festival is mainly celebrated in the streets surrounding Plaza de la Paja, Calle Toledo, Plaza de las Visitillas, and the Church of Our Lady of the Dove. Besides religious traditions such as the procession of Our Lady, there are various competitions, musical performances on open-air stages, food stalls, and more. Especially after sunset, people flock to the streets to enjoy a drink at open-air bars, admire the brightly lit and flower-adorned streets, and fully immerse themselves in the festive atmosphere.

History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme is a new programme at the Museo Reina Sofía that aims to establish a dialogue between Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937) and other significant works of art that present certain parallels in their modes of representation or thematic concerns, but which come from different historical and cultural contexts. In this first instalment of the series, curated by Tamar Garb, Picasso's emblematic work can be seen for the first time alongside African Guernica (1967) by Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991), one of the key artists of African modernity.Dumile Feni's work, which is markedly biographical in nature, emerged in the context of state violence and institutionalised racial oppression under South African apartheid. Created during the 1960s, African Guernica invokes Picasso's work, not only in its title but also in its synergies with the Spanish artist's visual vocabulary. In this way, Dumile Feni's large charcoal drawing also draws on the simplification and expressive distortion of figures, monochromatic tone and dramatic lighting, abstraction and dislocation of space, and even the conjunctions between animals and humans. But it is not only formal elements that resonate in the Spanish and African versions of Guernica; the shared use of a monumental scale is also crucial in highlighting the violence inherent in all situations of war, discrimination and oppression throughout history.Although it has been exhibited frequently in South Africa, African Guernica has never travelled abroad. Displayed in close dialogue with Picasso's work for the first time, this presentation invites visitors to the exhibition to speculate on the similarities and differences between the two works, created in different historical and geographical contexts, as well as to discover other works by the South African artist that are also part of the presentation. The confrontation between Picasso's anti-war cry of anguish in the context of the Spanish Civil War and the South African drawing created thirty years later in the context of the brutal violence of South African apartheid invites critical reflection on the different issues raised by the exhibition.History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme is a series of interventions within the Reina Sofía's Collection, that consist of juxtaposing an equivalent to Guernica from another time or geopolitical sphere, contextualised by an academic work of art history as an interpretative framework. The title of the series is a phrase traditionally attributed to the writer Mark Twain, but apocryphal, never written by the author.

The work of Andrea Canepa (Lima, 1980) lies in a space of dialogue between art, sociology, history, and anthropology. From this territory, Canepa explores how systems of visual, spatial, and symbolic organization mold the ways of seeing and understanding the world. Through a multidisciplinary practice, she approaches these systems as case studies which, remote as they may seem in space or time, invite to reflect on the way we live in today's world. Andrea Canepa's proposal for the second intervention on the tarpaulin temporarily covering the Palacio de Cristal while it undergoes restoration is centered on the textile bundles of the pre-Columbian culture of Paracas and the ancestral ritual of enwrapping the dead. The act of covering up, together with the many meanings contained in these bundles, has fascinated Canepa since childhood. Those bodies carefully wrapped in numerous layers of exquisitely woven cloths, where each pattern is laden with symbolism, left a deep imprint on her imagination. The artist moreover stresses the importance of the process, with time, gesture, and the ritual of covering presented as a fundamental episode that gives it more weight than its apparently provisional character. The tarpaulin now covering the Palacio thus ceases to be a merely temporary surface to become an element full of sense, a veil that transforms waiting into a time of significance. The tarpaulin shows images of bound and superimposed cloths. These are photographic reproductions enlarged on the basis of previously executed oil paintings. The capture of an instant through photography is thus combined with the reiterated gesture of painting, with its attentive observation and translation of what is perceived. Painting reality requires contemplating matter without questioning it, and this relaxed and almost meditative rhythm opens up a link to ritual. With this superimposition of temporalities and material media, Bundle generates a subtle sense of alienation. Beyond the immediate gaze, it reminds that reality is denser and more multifarious than the simple appearance people prefer to take refuge in. Canepa transfers these ideas to the context of the Palacio de Cristal, a 19th-century building representing a modernity for which transparency was a supreme value. Designed to be seen and to display, the building is now undergoing a phase of transformation that demands it be covered up and hidden from view. By wrapping it symbolically in layers of cloth, the artist undermines this logic of absolute visibility and invites us to retrieve what modernity banished: the mysterious, the sacred, the sensuality of material, and the right to opacity. Canepa's intervention also links the iron and glass architecture of the Palacio de Cristal with another of the great technical advances of its time: the optical artifacts precursory to the cinema. The building turns into a contemporary praxinoscope which transforms its glass panels into sequences covering and discovering textiles, generating a narrative cycle that is completed only by the movement of the visitor. In this back-and-forth motion between veiling and revealing, time ceases to be linear to become an experience: it stretches and folds over on itself, oscillating between presence and absence, between what is shown and what is held back.

The exhibition Aurèlia Muñoz. Beings offers a comprehensive overview of the work of an artist fundamental to understanding contemporary textile art. Involved in movements such as Nouvelle Tapisserie and the Catalan School of Tapestry, Aurèlia Muñoz (Barcelona, ​​1926–2011) transcended the boundaries of fabric, fiber, and craftsmanship. Her work, which combines ancestral techniques with contemporary resources, focuses on the impact of post-industrial crises on terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial ecosystems, which have become recurring motifs in her artistic production.On this occasion, her early collages and assemblages, with their surrealist and gothic influences, and her large-scale pictorial embroidery pieces give way to a previously unseen collection of macramé structures from institutions in Spain, Europe, and the United States. His iconic kite sculptures and his latest installations, made with handmade paper, are also fundamental to the exhibition, as is a wide selection of models and drawings being shown for the first time.The exhibition, whose title alludes to one of Muñoz's central concepts—entities (beings)—encompasses more than fifty years of his multifaceted practice, creating an unprecedented vision that seeks to open new perspectives on his unique legacy.The exhibition can also be visited at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) from November 5, 2026, to March 29, 2027.

Eva Jüszkiewicz (born 1984 in Gdansk, Poland) reconstructs the visual imagery of classical European portraiture, engaging in a critical dialogue with classic images of female beauty. She deconstructs and reimagines female figures depicted in historical paintings, placing these images within a contemporary context, thus opening up new, multi-layered interpretations. Jüszkiewicz combines exquisite traditional techniques with subversive and provocative content to create paintings that are both rooted in tradition and boldly break with convention.

This exhibition will showcase approximately eighty works, encompassing oil paintings, pastels, charcoal drawings, and sculptures (the latter created from the mid-1990s to the present), categorized by theme. Each section focuses on one of the most common classical art forms in her work—figures, still lifes, and landscapes—as well as Carmen Laffont's own iconic imagery, such as baskets, cabinets, grapevines, limestone or limescale, and salt mines.