On September 8, the Banco Santander Foundation will unveil Faro Santander, a new art museum and cultural hub on Spain’s northern coast. This week, the institution announced its debut slate of exhibitions. One draws from the expansive Banco Santander Collection, and another from the controversial Gelman Santander Collection. The Spanish engagement of “Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal”, which opened at London’s Freud Museum in March, rounds out the lineup.
Faro Santander occupies Banco Santander’s former headquarters, the 231-year-old Pereda Building, on Santander’s waterfront. In 2018, the 169-year old bank publicized plans to vacate its iconic home of nearly a century and “open it to the city.” That process began in 2021. Since then, Pritzker Prize-winning British architect David Chipperfield has overseen the Pereda Building’s transformation into the 10-story, nearly 110,000 square-foot Faro Santander, replete with amenities like a technology hub, a space dedicated to Cantabrian artists, and a rooftop observation deck.
Faro Santander, in the city of Santander. Photo by Juan Baraja, courtesy of Faro Santander.
One floor of Faro Santander will display rotating selections from the Banco Santander Collection, which contains over 1,000 paintings, sculptures, works of decorative art, and even currency spanning the 2nd century B.C.E. through today. Many pieces within this trove hail from the collections of financial institutions that the bank has acquired since the 1980s. The organization has since called this impressive, patchworked collection “largely unknown.” Over email, a representative said that’s because the collection’s current home—at Banco Santander’s gallery on the outskirts of Madrid—hardly garners heavy interest.
As such, “Masterpieces from the Banco Santander Collection” will mark the collection’s highest-profile showcase to date. Spanish art historian María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco has curated the exhibition to recount art’s evolution across four sections. These include spiritual works by renaissance legends like El Greco and Titian, followed by varied landscapes from Venetian master Canaletto and living Spanish abstractionist Soledad Sevilla, still lifes dating from Baroque times to the 20th century, and portraiture illustrating how notions of the individual have shifted, as seen through the eyes of Spanish rebel Francisco de Goya and French-American visionary Niki de Saint Phalle alike.
Soledad Sevilla, Medio Oriente (1999). Photo courtesy of the Colección Banco Santander.
“We wanted to show how artists and images from different periods and styles come together,” Jiménez-Blanco said of the show in press materials, “and to bring out the currents that run through such a multifaceted collection.”
Meanwhile, “Modern Mexico in the Gelman Santander Collection” will present specimens from the 300-piece Gelman Collection, which features 95 works of Mexican modern art. European émigrés Jacques and Natasha Gelman bought some of these relics from the stars of their era, including standout pictures like Self Portrait as a Tehuana (1943) by Frida Kahlo and Calla Lily Vendor (1943) by Diego Rivera.
Diego Rivera, Retrato de Natasha Gelman (1943). © 2026 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust.
Controversy arose in January, when news broke that Mexico’s wealthy Zambrano family now owns the Gelman Collection and has recruited the Banco Santander Foundation to steward it. Some 68 pieces went on view months ago, for the first time in 20 years, at Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno. MAM director Marisol Argüelles, who curated both shows, told El Pais that Faro Santander’s edition will largely echo its predecessor. Critics have protested the show for defying both the Gelmans’ wishes and Mexico’s strict export laws.
To that end, “Modern Mexico in the Gelman Santander Collection” will only remain on view through January 10, 2027. The Spanish edition of “Symptomatic Surreal,” which will reunite the only two paintings that Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington made while institutionalized nearby, concludes that day too.
New publications will accompany both “Masterpieces from the Banco Santander Collection” and “Modern Mexico in the Gelman Santander Collection.” Artist performances, film screenings, and more will further animate all three inaugural shows as well, kicking off Faro Santander’s founding goal to engage the public more fully with Banco Santander’s cultural interests.