A New Era for the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza as a Landmark TBA21 Donation Creates a new Civic Hub for Contemporary Art, Ecology, and Public Participation
The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza (MNTB) announces 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.
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.
Borja and Blanca 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.
