Image: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
Museo Reina Sofía will reopen the Palacio de Velázquez in Retiro Park with 'The Wayward Pearl', an exhibition devoted to Madrid-born artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo. Running from 24 June 2026 to 8 March 2027, the show is presented with free admission and is installed at the Palacio de Velázquez, in Madrid.
The museum describes Sánchez Castillo’s practice as rooted in the proposition that “art is a force that makes state narratives tremble”. Working primarily through sculpture, he intervenes in the forms through which power represents itself, dismantling their symbols and exposing the fragile narratives that support them. His work, as presented by the museum, examines monuments, images, gestures and legends to show history not as a settled account but as a field of ongoing conflict that continues to shape the present.
The exhibition text emphasises the artist’s use of alteration as a critical method. Sánchez Castillo works from the remains of history, changing materials, scale and function in ways that subvert the relationship to the original object. In the museum’s examples, “a monumental sculpture becomes a child’s swing”, robots become tools of abstraction, and two riot trucks “dance a pas de deux”. These transformations are used to question forms of accepted normality and to reveal how authority, obedience and representation are often presented as natural when they are in fact constructed.
'The Wayward Pearl' also places Sánchez Castillo in dialogue with art history, from the Baroque to twentieth-century avant-garde, Minimalism and Conceptual Art. The exhibition title refers to La Perla Peregrina, the famous pearl discovered in Panama in the sixteenth century. According to the museum, the pearl’s history condenses ideas of singularity, value and authority: it passed into the court of Philip II of Spain, appeared in portraits by Diego Velázquez and his studio, and later travelled through turbulent political and private histories before disappearing from view after a 2011 auction.
The museum uses the pearl as a conceptual frame for the exhibition’s engagement with violence, beauty and transformation. Pearls, it notes, are born of intrusion: a foreign body enters the mollusc, which responds by coating it with nacre. That process, the text suggests, mirrors the way history accumulates layers of narrative, image and ritual around foundational acts of violence. Sánchez Castillo’s work is positioned as an artistic response to that condition, isolating trauma and returning it in an altered form rather than dissolving it into tradition.
The exhibition is curated by Ferran Barenblit and organised by Museo Reina Sofía. The online exhibition page gives the venue as Retiro Park, Palacio de Velázquez, and notes that it is free to enter. The museum’s summer programme also lists the show among its temporary exhibitions for 2026, alongside other projects in the main site and the surrounding complex.
