The Art Newspaper

Reina Sofía aims for private funding after change in legal status

And Prado extends deal with La Caixa bank

By Nicolas Smirnoff. Web only
Published online: 26 August 2011

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is soon to become "more flexible and agile"

MADRID. Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, has said that a law approved last May by the Spanish council of ministers will give the museum a new legal status that, as he put it, “will provide a more flexible and agile management frame[work] maintaining the public feature of the museum while adding elements that belong to private law.” In other words, it will now be easier to attract private funding.

Despite significant cuts in public funding, the Reina Sofía has nevertheless acquired 115 new works by 42 artists over the last six months, at a cost of €5m, said Borja-Villel. Most are works by Spanish artists including Antoni Tàpies, Elena Asins, Ibon Aranberri, and Joan Miró, however the list also includes works by Hans Haacke, Gordon Matta-Clark, Hélio Oiticica and others.

Attracting new sponsors is Borja-Villel's priority, but he also needs to cut spending. This means co-producing exhibitions for the rest of 2011 in collaboration with Tate Modern in London, MoMA in New York, and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves in Porto, Portugal. “This allows a significant reduction in the costs of the exhibitions and helps raise the Spanish public's awareness of international artists,” he added.

Meanwhile, Spain's La Caixa bank has reconfirmed and extended its sponsorship of an educational initiative at the Prado museum after the signing, in July, of an agreement worth €2.5m over four years. The bank also becomes an official patron of the museum.

The programme, “La Caixa, Museo del Prado—the Art of Education”, extends a collaboration begun in 2009, that aims to support family and school-based programmes. The first major event to come under the aegis of the new deal will be the exhibition “Goya: Lights and Shadows”, due to open on 15 March 2012 at the CaixaForum exhibition space in Barcelona, and curated by Manuela Mena and José Manuel Matilla from the Prado. The deal will see the bank supporting an exhibition a year until 2015.