Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, Spain

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS, also called the Museo Reina Sofía, Queen Sofía Museum, El Reina Sofía, or simply The Sofia) is Spain's national museum of 20th-century art. The museum was officially inaugurated on September 10, 1992, and is named for Queen Sofía. It is located in Madrid, near the Atocha train and metro stations, at the southern end of the so-called Golden Triangle of Art (located along the Paseo del Prado and also comprising the Museo del Prado and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza).

The museum is mainly dedicated to Spanish art. Highlights of the museum include excellent collections of Spain's two greatest 20th-century masters, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. Certainly, the most famous masterpiece in the museum is Picasso's painting Guernica. The Reina Sofía collection has works by artists such as Eduardo Chillida, Pablo Gargallo, Julio González, Luis Gordillo, Juan Gris, José Gutiérrez Solana, Joan Miró, Lucio Muñoz, Jorge Oteiza, Pablo Serrano, and Antoni Tàpies.

International artists are few in the collection, but there are works by Francis Bacon, Joseph Beuys, Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, Robert Delaunay, Max Ernst, Lucio Fontana, Damien Hirst, Donald Judd, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Yves Klein, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Magritte, Henry Moore, Bruce Nauman, Gabriel Orozco, Nam June Paik, Man Ray, Diego Rivera, Mark Rothko, Julian Schnabel, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, Clyfford Still, Yves Tanguy, and Wolf Vostell.

Along with its extensive collection, the museum offers a mixture of national and international temporary exhibitions in its many galleries, making it one of the world's largest museums for modern and contemporary art.

It also hosts a free-access library specializing in art, with a collection of over 100,000 books, over 3,500 sound recordings, and almost 1,000 videos.

Founded in 1990 after originally being created as an art centre, Museo Reina Sofía is among the culminating events of the Spanish transition to democracy, recovering Pablo Picasso's Guernica as well as an outstanding representation of the international avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes. In short, the founding of this museum means the recuperation of the experience of modernity previously missing from the Spanish context and the opportunity to try out new models of narration from a periphery that is neither lateral nor derivative, but is rather an entry way for new stories, historiographic models and artistic episodes that tip the balance of the orthodox canon of the main museums.

Therefore, the Museo Reina Sofía program is three-fold: on the one hand, rethinking the function of the museum today; on the other hand, analysing the mechanisms for mediation between the public and the institution; and finally, proposing new contexts and stories through the collection and exhibits that lead to a new notion of modernity.

The institution no longer considers its task to be simply the transmission of culture. Instead, it works with other agents and institutions, creating networks and alliances that strengthen the public sphere and position Museo Reina Sofía as a reference of prime importance in the geopolitical South. Similarly, the public is no longer conceived of as a homogenous and uniform multitude, but rather as a collective, multiple agent that questions, rejects and forms opinions, that builds, so to speak, its relationship with the Museum through the singularity of the artistic experience.

The building that houses Museo Reina Sofía is comprised of two parts: the museum's new wing, inaugurated in 2005 and built under the direction of the French architect Jean Nouvel, and the part that was originally built as the General Hospital, promoted by Philip II of Spain in the 16th century and later by Charles III of Spain. The original plans were drawn up by the engineer and architect Jose Agustín de Hermosilla in 1756 and continued by the Italian architect Francesco Sabatini during the second half of the 18th century. Today its appearance is far from the initial conception, due to the multiple modifications it has undergone despite the fact that it continued to be used as a hospital until 1968. It was then abandoned, leading to its deterioration during the subsequent years, until it was acquired by the Ministry of Education, in 1976, to be renovated and transformed into a cultural centre. In 1986, as a culmination of Spain's transition to democracy, the Reina Sofia Art Centre (Centro de Arte Reina Sofía) was created. Four years later it would become a National Museum (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía), with the founding of the current museum.

The Museum's continual development in terms of its collections and activities led to the decision to study the possibility of increasing its floor area. The studies performed ended in 1999 and, following an international call for bids, the architect Jean Nouvel was chosen to direct the co
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