Reina Sofía Museum

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is Spain's national museum of modern and contemporary art, housed in a converted 18th-century hospital building on the Paseo del Arte in central Madrid. The hospital structure, designed by Francesco Sabatini and built between 1776 and 1781, was repurposed as a museum of contemporary art in the late 1980s and opened as a national museum in 1992 under Queen Sofía. The permanent collection spans the early 20th century to the present, with particular strength in Spanish art of the interwar period and the Civil War era. The defining work in the collection is Pablo Picasso's Guernica (1937), a vast monochrome oil measuring 349 by 776 centimetres, painted in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by Nazi German aircraft during the Spanish Civil War. The painting toured internationally during the Franco era as a symbol of anti-fascist resistance and returned to Spain in 1981 following the restoration of democracy; it is housed in Room 206 of the Sabatini Building. The collection also holds the most comprehensive public assembly of works by Salvador Dalí in Spain, including major Surrealist paintings from the 1920s and 1930s, alongside significant works by Joan Miró from his mature period. The 2005 Nouvel Annex, designed by Jean Nouvel with a distinctive triangular metallic canopy on the south side, more than doubled the museum's exhibition capacity and introduced major new permanent and temporary exhibition spaces. Temporary exhibitions at the Reina Sofía are regularly of international significance, attracting loans from major institutions in Europe and North America. The museum forms part of the Paseo del Arte cultural corridor alongside the Prado and Thyssen-Bornemisza museums and attracts over 3 million visitors annually.