Safeguarding stories but dictating how to look at and engage with art - Museo Reina Sofia
- Veronica Revuelta Garrido
- Oct 6
- 2 min read
Updated: Oct 7
Visiting the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid always feels like stepping into a layered conversation between art and history. It’s not just one of Spain’s most significant cultural institutions, it’s a living archive of the country’s shifting identity. I’ve always liked this museum, not only because it protects some of my favourite paintings, but because it safeguards stories: personal, political (VERY), and collective. What makes it especially compelling is how its curatorial approach feels both grounded and experimental. They take risks with some works, or with those that allow it; yet they always circle back to the same pulse of memory, resistance, and transformation. Pretty much my calling.
The experience of visiting a museum in Spain is different from the UK. Here, every gallery has its invigilators, quietly (or not) policing proximity to the artworks, a reminder that, in Spain, art is still treated as a national treasure often in an old and traditional way. You can’t touch it, of course, but you can’t even bend to look closely at a low-hung work without being told off. Don’t talk too loudly. Don’t linger too long in front of a piece because the invigilator will look at you like if you are planning to steal it. Don’t crouch, only kids are allowed (legit). It’s almost a imposed performance. You’re not just looking at art; but dictated how to look and engage with it. It makes me wonder, is our own body language disrespectful to whom? The painting, the artist, the invigilator, or the institution itself? There’s a tension here between reverence and rigidity, preservation and participation.
Besides, you need to pay to enter, which may feel fair or exclusionary, depending on your perspective. Yet, despite these barriers, the Reina Sofía manages to be deeply public in spirit and be very busy at all times.
The museum tells stories that are uncomfortable, layered, and often painful, transforming the official historical narrative constructed by forty years of dictatorship. I find it fascinating that such chapters are openly displayed and discussed, while in the UK, institutions often hesitate to face their own darker histories so directly.
Anyway, all this reminds me that the Reina Sofía is not only preserving art but preserving the conditions that shaped it: war, trauma, resistance, and renewal. Around it, the museum unfolds as a constellation of responses. I left the museum thinking about how it embraces its own contradictions, order and chaos, pain and beauty, reverence and rebellion. It’s a place where art doesn’t just hang; maybe that’s why the Reina Sofía still feels alive, even if its hangings barely change from year to year (but they add new works in between and that's great). Some stories, after all, don’t need rearranging, they just need to keep being told.
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