Madrid Collects: 50 Contemporary Art Collections

The exhibition ‘Madrid Colecciona: 50 colecciones de arte contemporáneo’ [Madrid Collects: 50 Contemporary Art Collections] is a tribute to the vital role played by today’s collectors in shaping and sustaining the city’s artistic and cultural ecosystem. The exhibition highlights the central role of collectors, underscoring their fundamental contribution to the preservation and enrichment of cultural and social heritage, as well as their decisive impact on the promotion of contemporary art, the development and continuity of artistic careers, and the vitality of the art market.

Featuring 100 works across painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, video, and installation, the exhibition offers a diverse journey that reflects the richness of contemporary art and the dedication of collectors who safeguard its future.

The exhibition is divided into five sections: ‘Contemporary Horizons’, ‘Beyond the Line’, ‘Shadows of Power’, ‘The Body as Territory’, and ‘Constructed Space’.

As one of the organisations that is reshaping the Madrid artistic ecosystem TBA21 has been invited to contribute to this exhibition with two significant works selected by its founder and chairwoman, Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza that shows the foundation’s commitment with the belief in art and culture as catalysts for social and environmental transformation and ultimately in the service of a culture of peace, understood as a continuous practice in the affirmation of life, diversity, and coexistence.

Through these choices, the exhibition reveals the bonds that connect collectors to their works, while mapping the diverse sensibilities and motivations that guide the practice of collecting. In the case of the TBA21 Collection, the selected works are examples of the long-term dedication of the organisation to socially engaged and critically transformative art through projects and works that connect artistic practice with social, political, and environmental concerns.

In this sense, Jenny Holzer’s practice resonates deeply with that mission. Her work ARNO (1996), a pair of white marble benches engraved with intimate, grief-stricken texts, was among the earliest acquisitions of the TBA21 Collection. Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza selected this extraordinary piece because it reflects the core principles of TBA21’s trajectory and her own collecting ethos: to support art that fosters social and environmental transformation and promotes a culture of peace. Holzer’s practice resonates deeply with these principles. Her incisive use of language confronts both personal and collective tragedy, in this case, the AIDS crisis that claimed millions of lives in the late twentieth century. By engraving intimate sentences onto a public structure—a bench—Holzer transforms mourning into a shared, public act of reflection and empathy. These benches exemplify how contemporary art can create spaces for care, courage, and collective responsibility, reminding us that empathy is the beginning of change and that remembering is an act of resistance. 

Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza: "For me, the power of contemporary art lies precisely here: a quiet but powerful insistence that art can shape our future by awakening our sense of responsibility toward one another and toward the planet.”

The recent acquisition of Jasbir Puar and Dima Srouji’s Bus Tickets (2023) gives Palestinian artists a strong voice in the TBA21 collection. This installation, composed of 150 etched and patinated brass replicas of school bus tickets, evokes daily life in early-2000s occupied Palestine, bearing witness to decades of suffering under Israeli colonialism and violence. Once essential for students’ journeys to school, these tickets became symbols of fragile means of escape during the Second Intifada. Oxidized and transformed, they now act as markers of memory, resilience, and communal life. By including this work, TBA21 continues its long-standing commitment to supporting artists whose practices confront the legacies of colonial and extractivist violence and imagine liberatory futures. Collecting such works is not an act of possession but a call to action: an invitation to witness, reflect, and participate in the social and ethical transformations that contemporary art can inspire.

Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza: “With artists like Jasbir Puar and Dime Srouji, we continue our mission of promoting, whenever possible, a culture of peace.”