Controversial Gelman Collection to Inaugurate Spain’s New Faro Santander in September

The Banco Santander Foundation announced September 8 as the new opening date for its forthcoming art center, the Faro Santander. The news was first reported by El País.

The space’s three inaugural shows include a Leonora Carrington solo, an exhibition looking at the Banco Santander’s previously unseen collection of masterpieces, and “Modern Mexico in the Gelman Santander Collection,” drawing from the holdings of the Gelman Collection, which has been mired in controversy since January when the foundation revealed that it now owned 160 of the 300 works that had been assembled by Jacques and Natasha Gelman between 1941 and 1998. They were originally to go on view at the Faro Santander in June.  

The Gelman Collection is considered one of the most important holdings of Mexican art, with important works by some of the country’s most influential 20th-century artists, including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Many of the works in the collection are categorized as “artistic monuments” under Mexican law, meaning they cannot be permanently removed from the country.

Over 200 artists and art professionals in Mexico signed an open letter decrying the works’ exportation to Spain, saying that the government had committed an “institutional blunder” by letting the works travel and not acquiring them for the national collection. The Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura had previously said that while the Gelman collection “is truly an extremely expensive collection,” the government wouldn’t be able to raise the “public resources would not necessarily be sufficient for an acquisition of this magnitude.”

In response, the Santander Foundation said that it did not plan to permanently remove the works and quickly organized an exhibition “Relatos Modernos. Obras Emblemáticas de la Colección Gelman Santander” at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City in February; that exhibition was organized by MAM director Marisol Argüelles. The Faro Santander exhibition, also curated by Argüelles, will be “a new presentation of the collection” and include an “outstanding body of photography,” according to a release, and be on view until January 10, 2027.

“This exhibition will offer multiple perspectives on Mexican modernity, bringing together leading muralists as well as artists who pursued alternative paths within the country’s art scene,” Argüelles said in a statement, adding that Kahlo’s art “occupies a central place in the collection, which includes an outstanding group of self-portraits tracing the artist’s personal and artistic development.”

Works that will feature in the exhibition include Kahlo’s Diego en mi pensamiento (Diego on My Mind) and Autorretrato con monos (Self-Portrait with Monkeys); Rivera’s Portrait of Natasha Gelman and Vendedora de alcatraces (Woman Selling Calla Lilies); Tamayo’s Portrait of Cantinflas, which the foundation described as “a testament to the friendship between Jacques Gelman and [Cantinflas], one of Mexican cinema’s best-known figures” and Francisco Toledo’s watercolor Perro con escoba (Dog with Broom), one of the last works acquired by Natasha Gelman.

Faro Santander’s “Modern Mexico” exhibition will also be accompanied by live programming, including “film screenings, music, talks and guided tours that bring out the many stories contained within the works, with a special focus on Día de Muertos, one of the most cherished festivals in the Mexican calendar,” per a release. These programs are presented in collaboration with the Fundación Casa de México and the Cultural Institute of México in Spain.

The Faro Santander will be housed in the bank’s former 108,000-square-foot headquarters, which has undergone a renovation by Pritzker Prize–winning architect David Chipperfield. The new art center will have six floors dedicated to exhibition space, as well as a technology hub, a family space, an auditorium, a restaurant, and a rooftop observation deck that overlooks the Bay of Santander.

The Faro Santander will dedicate an entire floor in the forthcoming building to the Banco Santander collection, which has been assembled over the past 160 years and has rarely been shown to the public. “Masterpieces from the Banco Santander Collection” will be the first iteration of this rotating display.

Curated by art historian María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco, the exhibition will feature works from across five centuries by some of Western art history’s most essential names, including Lucas Cranach the Elder, Titian, El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Francisco de Zurbarán, Jusepe de Ribera, Diego Velázquez, Anthony van Dyck, Canaletto, Francisco Goya, and Joan Miró. The exhibition will also feature postwar contemporary Spanish artists, like Antoni Tàpies, Soledad Sevilla, Juan Uslé, Eduardo Chillida, and Cristina Iglesias.

Jiménez-Blanco has also edited an accompanying volume titled Nuevas miradas, which will feature “14 specialists from different cultural fields offer their personal reflections on a selection of the collection’s most significant works,” per a release.

 “The Symptomatic Surreal: Leonora Carrington” focuses on the art she made in Santander, while staying at a sanatorium during World War II. It travels from the Freud Museum in London, but the Santander iteration will feature of the recently discovered painting Villa Pilar, which Carrington had gifted to her doctor.

“We open Faro Santander with three great exhibitions,” a Faro Santander spokesperson told ARTnews in an email. “Each exhibition has its own narrative, and together they reflect a shared commitment to bringing art and culture closer to everyone by creating new spaces for discovery, participation, and connection. Through this diverse exhibition program, the center aims to strengthen the position of Santander and Cantabria as one of the leading cultural hubs in northern Spain and to consolidate its presence on the international art scene.”

See images from the inaugural Faro Santander exhibitions—“Modern Mexico in the Gelman Santander Collection” and “Masterpieces from the Banco Santander Collection”—below.