| A Donation for the Public: The MNTB, renowned for its unique collection spanning nearly eight centuries of art history, extends its holdings into the 21st century by permanently incorporating a significant part of the TBA21 CollectionThe TBA21 Collection: Built over twenty years by Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza and TBA21, the collection brings together masterpieces of international contemporary art at the intersection of ecology and social justice, complementing Spain’s existing national collections without duplication. Its approach — grounded in working directly with artists through large-scale, museum-scale curatorial commissions — sets it apart from other private collectionsNo Financial Consideration: More than 180 works worth 16 million will pass fully and permanently into public ownership free of charge, accompanied by a long-term loan of nearly 180 additional works worth approximately 10 million. This complements Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza’s existing loans of historical works worth 70 million at the MNTB, bringing the combined value of the contribution to nearly €100 millionContinuing a Family Legacy: The Thyssen-Bornemisza family carries its collecting vocation into its fourth generation through Francesca, Blanca, and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza paving the way for future generationsRevitalizing Public Infrastructure: The Spanish State will refurbish a publicly owned building that has been unused for decades, successfully reintegrating it into the cultural and civic life of MadridA Civic Project for the Community, not Tourism: The project focuses on community encounter and public programming built around major pressing social challengesShared Infrastructure: The new facility will also house the Madrid headquarters of the Victims of Terrorism Memorial Centreimeline: An international architectural competition will be launched in early 2027, with construction scheduled for completion around 2031 |
| Madrid, 16.09.2026. The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (MNTB) today announced the inauguration of a new chapter. The institution is embarking on a crucial transformation with the opening of an extension of the Museum in a new publicly owned space: the former Palacio del Hielo y del Automóvil de Madrid, located on Calle Duque de Medinaceli. The new venue will house a significant selection of contemporary artworks from the TBA21 Collection, the result of a historic donation made without financial compensation or any form of private return. The space will be conceived as a meeting point for contemporary art, ecology, and citizen participation. The Minister of Finance, Arcadi España García, and the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, made the announcement today in the auditorium of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. Also present at the event were Evelio Acevedo and Guillermo Solana, Managing Director and Artistic Director of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, respectively; Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, President and Founder of the TBA21 Foundation; and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza. Arcadi España confirmed that “the Spanish Government will transfer the Palacio de Hielo y del Automóvil to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation for the expansion of the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum,” a building that, after remaining unused since 2007, “is today regaining a purpose worthy of its history” and will house the expansion linked to the collection of Francesca Thyssen, “which she is going to donate to the museum.” Culture Minister Ernest Urtasun, for his part, thanked Francesca for this “extraordinary contribution” and highlighted its significance for the institution’s future: “We want to seize this opportunity to expand the Thyssen itself,” he explained, before announcing that a new venue would be created and emphasizing: “We do not simply want a larger museum; we also want a much more open museum.” The museum’s artistic director, Guillermo Solana, placed the announcement within a process that began years ago to strengthen the presence of contemporary art at the institution. He recalled that, since 2008, the museum’s leadership had worked to ensure that living artists “should return to this house” through Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza and TBA21: “It took us more than ten years to convince the board of trustees — sometimes things take time — and, finally, in 2018, TBA21 and the museum held their first joint exhibition.” This new chapter also featured remarks by Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza, who reflected on the pride his father would feel upon seeing “his legacy so well cared for and expanded,” and expressed his commitment to the continuity of the family legacy. Rather than a simple addition of space, the proposed expansion integrates the Museum’s existing and new premises into a single, cohesive cultural ecosystem. This expansion addresses a long-identified structural need: providing dedicated space for education, research, conservation, and public participation that exceeds the limits of the Palacio de Villahermosa, thereby relieving congestion in the historic building and enriching the visitor experience. This path follows the successful historical precedents of the Museo Nacional del Prado and the Museo Reina Sofía, both of which expanded to adequately fulfill their public missions. Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza: “A collection is not a possession, but a conversation with the world” Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza emphasized the significance of the moment: “The announcement we are making here today is more than a donation. It is a commitment that my family has been keeping, in one form or another, for over a century” A vision, she explained, that she inherited from her own father: “My father taught me that a collection is not a possession, but a conversation with the world; but a dialogue with the world, held only briefly, in trust.” This philosophy has also shaped the way TBA21 has worked since its inception: “Within the first two years of its existence we made an unusual decision: we would rather commission a work into being than acquire one that already existed. This is a completely different way of engaging with artists, and it means accepting the risk of an experiment whose outcome may not be what either the artist or the commissioner had imagined.” For Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, the donation represents the coming together of two complementary ways of seeing the world: “The Museum’s collection offers a record of how the West once viewed the world over the course of seven centuries. TBA21 is a living record of how the world sees itself now, through ecological thought, oceanic knowledge, Indigenous cosmologies, and political ecologies. With this donation, both records come together into the same institution.” She concluded by placing this gesture within the trajectory of the generations that preceded her: “If my great-grandfather’s generation asked what art could show us about beauty, and my father’s asked what art could do for peace between nations, ours is asking what art can do to help us imagine, together, ways of living well collectively on a rapidly changing planet.” |
| A Family Legacy The catalyst for this transformation is the exceptional donation of more than 180 works from the TBA21 Collection by Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza and her heirs. This donation opens a vital new chapter, extending the permanent collection into the present and welcoming a new generation of collectors from the Thyssen-Bornemisza family. Animated by the same philanthropic spirit as previous generations, the project carries the family’s commitment to the arts forward into its fourth. In addition to the donation, TBA21 will provide a long-term loan of nearly 180 contemporary artworks. The donation adds €16 million in assets to public art holdings, alongside a €10 million loan and the existing long-term loan of works by Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza valued at approximately €70 million. Taken together, the overall commitment to the Spanish State amounts to nearly €100 million. The collaboration between the MNTB and TBA21, initiated in 2018, has consistently renewed the Museum’s programming and broadened its audiences by placing historical collections in dialogue with contemporary creation. This interplay between the historical collection built by Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza and his predecessors—as well as his wife, Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza—and the contemporary interventions curated by Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza’s foundation TBA21 forms one of the most dynamic institutional dialogues in Madrid. Blanca and Borja Thyssen-Bornemisza have also demonstrated a deep commitment to sustaining this legacy. Since 2023, they have extended long-term loans from their private collection and regularly organized exhibitions at the museum. Their collection spans early 20th-century avant-garde masters, post-war Modernism, and contemporary Hyperrealism, including modern and contemporary paintings, the American Hyperrealist movement, and graffiti art. Masterpieces by Francis Picabia, Alex Katz, André Butzer, Ross Bleckner, Peter Halley, and Kenny Scharf are currently on view, creating a vital bridge across generations. |
| A Complementary Civic Space The new centre will occupy part of the former Palacio del Hielo y del Automóvil on Calle Duque de Medinaceli, situated just a few meters from the main museum building. Conceived as public infrastructure for contemporary art, the centre complements Madrid’s museum landscape, where the Museo Reina Sofía is currently the only major state institution fully dedicated to this field. It will work in close dialogue with local initiatives like the Tabacalera Centre for Production and Artistic Residencies while remaining anchored in the Thyssen-Bornemisza mission: articulating continuity between historical modernity and contemporary production. The Founding Donation The donation is the founding act of the project. It represents a complete and permanent transfer of assets into public ownership with no financial consideration or private return. The 186 donated works and 179 long-term loan works form a coherent body of ecologically themed contemporary art that is impossible to assemble on the open market. The collection features works by a diverse range of international artists, including Ai Weiwei, Marina Abramović, John Akomfrah, Monica Bonvicini, Candice Breitz, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Claudia Comte, Olafur Eliasson, Taloi Havini, Nikita Kadan, Pierre Huyghe, Rashid Johnson, Ernesto Neto, Bill Viola and Wu Tsang. Founded in 2002 and established as a Spanish foundation after relocating to Madrid in 2019, TBA21 has assembled one of the world’s most influential private collections of contemporary art. The foundation focuses on the intersections of art, ecology, and social justice, expanding the canon toward artists from the so called Global South, Indigenous practitioners, and voices historically underrepresented in European narratives. The collection TBA21 dialogues naturally with the holdings of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, complements the national collections, and introduces interdisciplinary practices previously absent from the public heritage. In addition, the works in the TBA21 Collection span virtually every language of contemporary art — painting, sculpture, installation, performance, sound, film, and digital work. Local Impact and Ecological Care The impact on the surrounding neighborhood has been a primary consideration of the project, which will share the building with the Madrid headquarters of the Victims of Terrorism Memorial Centre. An open listening phase with local residents will define uses, community priorities and needs. Ecology is approached here as a shared civic condition: the building itself will function as a climate shelter for vulnerable groups during periods of extreme heat, translating ecological responsibility into immediate public care. At a moment of environmental urgency, the reopening of this building represents the return of public space to public life, proposing an institutional model for the future. |
| TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary is a leading international art and advocacy foundation. The foundation’s vision and ethos are expressed through two closely connected areas of work: supporting artists over the long term through the development and production of artworks (commissions), and implementing artist-led projects that explore critical ecological issues, with a particular focus on the ocean and social justice (research). TBA21 is headquartered in Madrid, where it works in association with the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, and has other key hubs of action in Venice and Portland, Jamaica. All activity at TBA21 is collaborative and fundamentally driven by artists and the belief in art and culture as integral components of social and environmental transformation, ultimately in the service of peace. For TBA21, art is a complex form of knowledge production: it draws on what is already known while revealing its own limitless, imaginative, uncategorizable nature. Convinced that art can act as a transformative force within society, the Foundation explores new modes of production and presentation designed to catalyze social and environmental change. This new mode of inquiry asks, with real urgency, how artistic practice can step outside the confines of the artworld itself and intervene directly in the public sphere. The Foundation’s Platform for Artistic Research and Action TBA21–Academy is TBA21’s research and advocacy arm, fostering deeper relationships with the Earth’s hydrosphere and its extended ecologies through the lens of art to activate new forms of care and collective action. Operating as an incubator for collaborative inquiry, research-based artistic production, and environmental advocacy, the Academy works through exhibitions, commissions, fieldwork, residencies, pedagogical programs, and assemblies, emerging from exchanges between art, science, policy, and civic engagement. TBA21–Academy operates through three interconnected laboratories: Ocean Space in Venice, Organismo developed with Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, and Convivial Living Lab in Jamaica. Together, they function as situated field stations where art, research, and activism are grounded in specific contexts and aquatic ecologies, developed in close collaboration with local communities while simultaneously thinking at a planetary scale. Over the last years, TBA21–Academy has increasingly taken on the role of an agent in the world of advocacy: engaging with international forums, supporting experimental governance practices, and working with partners to articulate new legal, cultural, and political frameworks for more just ocean futures. |
