SANTANDER.- Maruja Mallo (Viveiro, Galicia, 1902–Madrid, 1995) was a leading artist of the Spanish Avant-Garde and surrealism, and one of the central figures of the ‘Generation of ’27’, an important group of artists and writers based in Madrid, which included Rafael Alberti, Salvador Dalí, Federico Garcia Lorca and Luis Buñuel. Her vibrant and diverse artistic output blurred the boundaries between the popular and the avant-garde, between aesthetics and politics, ultimately presenting a feminine worldview from the unprecedented perspective of the modern woman.

This ambitious retrospective will present around 100 paintings and drawings, together with writings and photographs by the artist that chart her entire career: from the new realism of her early days to the geometric and fantastic configurations of her final works. The show will emphasise how the popular, the performative and the telluric permeated the artist’s initial work, highlighting her ties with the theatre. The exhibition will trace the changes in her work due to the Spanish Civil War and her exile in Buenos Aires, where her portraits and still lifes metaphorically translate the impact of the environment and the culture of her adopted home.

The exhibition is co-organised by Fundación Botín, Santander, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, where the exhibition will take place from the October 7, 2025 until March 16, 2026.

Curator: Patricia Molins.

Enredos 2: Nuno Da Luz
May 24–October 19, 2025

For the second edition of Centro Botín’s Enredos programme, Portuguese artist Nuno da Luz will present an atmospheric and poetic interplay between his newly commissioned sound installations and a selection of works from Fundación Botín’s art collection, by artists such as Javier Arce, Katinka Bock, June Crespo & Maddi Barber, Tacita Dean, Asier Mendizabal, Damian Ortega, Leticia Ramos and Jorge Satorre.

Titled “Collected Airs”, Nuno da Luz´s new series of works is conceived as a collective listening space composed of a growing and evolving ensemble of reverberation units that stretch and sustain any sound they receive in an echo. The analogue effect units will stream real-time ambient sound from outside Centro Botín, and later become a timestamp and record of a particular date and time of the day, with its changing weather patterns and unpredictable events.

Enredos is an exhibition programme that seeks to support and work closely with artists that have previously received a Fundación Botín Art Grant, who are invited to reengage with the collection, the building and its audiences. Nuno da Luz (Portugal, 1984) is a sound artist, publisher and researcher whose work circumscribes both aural and visual in the form of installations, performances, and printed matter. Grounded in attentive listening as an eco-sensible methodology, his practice undulates between the ecologies and pedagogies of noise-making and bookmaking.

Curators: Nuno da Luz and Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz.

Cooking Sections
October 18, 2025–March 2026

Cooking Sections’ first exhibition in Spain will present a series of works that trace the unexpected contours of human-made waves, clouds, shells, or tides. These material records can be read like the palm of the hand, revealing stories of desires and alliances, labour and dreams, histories of both past and present. Through phenomena such as offshore dredging, eroding estuaries, fish farming, soil acidification and rising sea levels, the exhibition uncovers the signs and signals of extractivism etched onto coastal lands.

The exhibition follows on from Reading Ocean Imprints, a workshop led by Cooking Sections in September 2024 that took place in Santander and the Nansa Valley in Cantabria. The programme explored the natural environment of Cantabria and analysed the traces that human activity leaves in the ecosystems through readings, improvisations and performative actions.

Cooking Sections was established by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe in London in 2013. Their practice uses food as a lens and a tool to trace landscapes in transformation, the spatial and metabolic legacies of extractivism. They have worked on multiple iterations of the long-term site-responsive CLIMAVORE project since 2015, exploring how to eat as humans change climates and how to metabolise climate breakdown.

Curator: Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz

Itinerarios XXX
November 15, 2025–April 2026

Since 1993, Fundación Botín has awarded the Fundación Botín Art Grant to support Spanish and international artists in the research and production of new projects. The annual exhibition Itinerarios is the culmination of this grant, reflecting a broad range of interests and artistic practices.

The thirtieth edition of Itinerarios will present the works of Gelen Jeleton (Murcia 1975), Javier Bravo de Rueda (Callao, Perú, 1989), Noa & Lara Castro Lema (A Coruña, 1998), Diego Delas (Aranda de Duero, Burgos, 1983), Nader Koochaki (San Sebastián, 1983) and Eduardo Navarro (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1979).