Madrid,
This year, the ICO Museum in Madrid celebrates its three decades of hosting exhibitions – almost half of that period, since 2012, focusing on the dissemination of architecture as an artistic and cultural discipline. It is one of the few institutions that dedicate its activity to architecture, urban planning and photography with the desire to bring them closer to a non-specialized public, through various activities and guided tours.
To celebrate, this center will host three exhibitions in the coming months that will analyze, and also pay tribute, to its own museum career and identity; It must be remembered that the beginnings of the museum, inaugurated in 1996, had to do with the desire to exhibit the ICO collections, which were then the starting point of a program that has gradually expanded its gaze towards those areas linked to urban construction and its representation.
From next February 10 we will be able to visit, in its rooms on Zorilla Street in Madrid, “Transiting the 20th century. Drawing and sculpture in the ICO Collections”, an exhibition that, remembering the first steps of this space, will tour part of the ICO collection. Curated by María Toral, it will focus on the relationship between the languages of stroke and volume with the social, political and aesthetic changes throughout the last century.
Open until May, it will feature works by thirty-four creators, including sculptors and architects, dated from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1980s, and in many cases the drawings will allow us to delve into the most intimate aspect of their thinking and experimentation; also in the details of the transition of an idea from fragile paper to sculptural forcefulness. There will be no shortage of creations by Julio González, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Miquel Barceló, Susana Solano, Carmen Laffón, Eduardo Chillida or Jorge Oteiza.
Already in the month of June, the ICO Museum will join a new edition of the PhotoESPAÑA festival with the exhibition “Jorge Yeregui: Territory, architecture and culture”, dedicated to the work of this architect and photographer. In his series he delves into the transformation of the environment and its social, cultural and political dimensions.
And the 2026 program will conclude with the first retrospective offered in our country to the Indian architect Anupama Kundoo, which will be presented starting in October. Kundoo – whom we already met here in the collective “The architect is present”, in 2014 – develops sustainable architectural models, respectful of both the environment and the socioeconomic contexts to which they must adapt. With this exhibition, the ICO Museum deepens its exhibition line linked to experimental architectures developed in non-European contexts.
