{"id":61729,"date":"2026-07-27T20:24:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-27T20:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/61729\/"},"modified":"2026-07-27T20:24:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T20:24:12","slug":"faro-santanders-inaugural-exhibitions-led-by-contested-gelman-collection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/61729\/","title":{"rendered":"Faro Santander\u2019s Inaugural Exhibitions Led by Contested Gelman Collection"},"content":{"rendered":"

On September 8, the Banco Santander Foundation will unveil Faro Santander, a new art museum and cultural hub on Spain\u2019s 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<\/a> Gelman Santander Collection. The Spanish engagement of \u201cLeonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal<\/a>\u201d, which opened at London\u2019s Freud Museum in March, rounds out the lineup.<\/p>\n

Faro Santander occupies Banco Santander\u2019s former headquarters, the 231-year-old Pereda Building, on Santander\u2019s waterfront. In 2018, the 169-year old bank publicized<\/a> plans to vacate its iconic home of nearly a century and \u201copen it to the city.\u201d That process began<\/a> in 2021. Since then, Pritzker Prize-winning British architect David Chipperfield has overseen the Pereda Building\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"An<\/p>\n

Faro Santander, in the city of Santander. Photo by Juan Baraja, courtesy of Faro Santander.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> this impressive, patchworked collection \u201clargely unknown.\u201d Over email, a representative said that\u2019s because the collection\u2019s current home\u2014at Banco Santander\u2019s gallery on the outskirts of Madrid<\/a>\u2014hardly garners heavy interest.<\/p>\n

As such, \u201cMasterpieces from the Banco Santander Collection\u201d will mark the collection\u2019s highest-profile showcase to date. Spanish art historian Mar\u00eda Dolores Jim\u00e9nez-Blanco has curated the exhibition to recount art\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"An<\/p>\n

Soledad Sevilla, Medio Oriente (1999). Photo courtesy of the Colecci\u00f3n Banco Santander.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to show how artists and images from different periods and styles come together,\u201d Jim\u00e9nez-Blanco said of the show in press materials, \u201cand to bring out the currents that run through such a multifaceted collection.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, \u201cModern Mexico in the Gelman Santander Collection\u201d will present specimens from the 300-piece Gelman Collection, which features<\/a> 95 works of Mexican modern art. European \u00e9migr\u00e9s 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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Diego Rivera, Retrato de Natasha Gelman (1943). \u00a9 2026 Banco de M\u00e9xico Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust.<\/p>\n

Controversy arose in January, when news broke that Mexico\u2019s 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\u2019s Museo de Arte Moderno. MAM director Marisol Arg\u00fcelles, who curated both shows, told El Pais<\/a> that Faro Santander\u2019s edition will largely echo its predecessor. Critics have protested the show for defying both the Gelmans\u2019 wishes and Mexico\u2019s strict export laws<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To that end, \u201cModern Mexico in the Gelman Santander Collection\u201d will only remain on view through January 10, 2027. The Spanish edition of \u201cSymptomatic Surreal,<\/a>\u201d which will reunite the only two paintings that Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington made while institutionalized nearby, concludes that day too.<\/p>\n

New publications will accompany both \u201cMasterpieces from the Banco Santander Collection\u201d and \u201cModern Mexico in the Gelman Santander Collection.\u201d Artist performances, film screenings, and more will further animate all three inaugural shows as well, kicking off Faro Santander\u2019s founding goal to engage the public more fully with Banco Santander\u2019s cultural interests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On September 8, the Banco Santander Foundation will unveil Faro Santander, a new art museum and cultural hub…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61730,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[121],"tags":[24759,14813,24008,14812,144,24756,6359,2809,24764,18063,24755,2808,24758,24768,24769,15398,24766,24767,16183,24762,247,4524,24765,14356,24757,284,17,1152,24770,24763,24760,24761],"class_list":["post-61729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-banco-santander","tag-art-collector","tag-art-history","tag-art-museum","tag-artnet-news","tag-banco-santander","tag-banco-santander-collection","tag-cantabria","tag-diego-rivera","tag-el-greco","tag-exhibitions","tag-faro-santander","tag-frida-kahlo","tag-gelman-collection","tag-gelman-santander-collection","tag-jacques-and-natasha-gelman","tag-leonora-carrington","tag-maria-dolores-jimenez-blanco","tag-marisol-arguelles","tag-mexican-art","tag-mexican-muralist","tag-mexico","tag-mexico-city","tag-museo-de-arte-moderno","tag-museums","tag-museums-and-institutions","tag-santander","tag-spain","tag-spanish","tag-symptomatic-surreal","tag-titian","tag-zambrano","tag-zambrano-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}