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Exhibitions

The great frieze of Miguel Ángel Tornero

A visual tour of daily life in Madrid at the Palacio de Cristal.

Detall del 'Gran Friso', Miguel Ángel Tornero.
The great frieze of Miguel Ángel Tornero
bonart madrid - 24/01/25

The Palacio de Cristal, in Madrid's Retiro Park, is immersed in an ambitious restoration project that will last until June 2027. During this period, the artist Miguel Ángel Tornero (Baeza, 1978) has transformed the canvases that cover the building into a monumental work, the 'Gran Friso'. This artistic intervention proposes a poetic look at daily life in Madrid through photographic collages that surround the structure. Tornero has created a "mundane frieze" that combines images of urban life with elements of the ongoing restoration work. The photographs, printed with sustainable technology, show scenes of everyday life in the city. Following the tradition of classic friezes, this canvas offers a visual narrative that is revealed as the building is surrounded.

The artist's creative process involved walking through various neighborhoods of the city, especially Moratalaz, where he resides, and Carabanchel, where he works, capturing images that reflect the urban essence of the city. Tornero describes his work as "a fragmented mirror of the city, a kind of recent urban archaeology that combines the everyday and the symbolic, the ephemeral and the permanent". This visual chronicle also aims to reflect on the evolution of contemporary cities and the tensions between the monumental and the everyday, in a dialogue between past and present.

The great frieze of Miguel Ángel Tornero 'Gran Friso', Miguel Ángel Tornero. Vista general de l'intervenció al Palacio de Cristal. Museu Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2025

In the images, small businesses, large urban advertising campaigns, homeless people and the architectural elements that support the city's emblematic buildings coexist. The result is a fragmented totality, a sum full of contradictions that simultaneously reflect the proliferation and visual saturation typical of contemporary culture. Tornero's works achieve that photography, despite reducing reality to two dimensions, restores to the image its condition as an object.

The director of the Reina Sofía Museum, Manuel Segade , highlights that this intervention takes up the idea of the "classical frieze" and allows the Palacio de Cristal to continue being a reference for contemporary art in Madrid, despite the works and its closure to the public. Segade emphasizes that this space is "the most democratic as a national museum", since visitors who walk through the Retiro encounter art in unexpected ways, and little by little they integrate it into their daily experiences.

The great frieze of Miguel Ángel Tornero 'Gran Friso', Miguel Ángel Tornero. Vista general de l'intervenció al Palacio de Cristal. Museu Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2025

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