Liria Palace will be hosting an exhibition from 19 February to 5 July 2026 in which José María Sicilia will install recent paintings created specifically for the occasion, as well as a site-specific installation in the most emblematic rooms of the palace.
This exhibition represents the Casa de Alba Foundation’s commitment to contemporary art, continuing its tradition of patronages that has characterised it ever since it was founded.
With a range of works in terms of media, references and formal displacements, as well as an extensive career, José María Sicilia (Madrid, 1954), one of the leading representatives of painting in the 1980s, will present pieces in the rooms of Liria Palace as a result of attentive listening to the dormant stories that the place preserves. These paintings are intertwined with the building’s architecture and memory, fostering dialogue between the Casa de Alba Collection and the present.
The exhibition also brings together pieces from earlier periods that provide a broad overview of the artist's career in recent decades and reveal stories, symbols, memories and poetic correspondence. Located in this unique setting, these works take on a different meaning: a reframing that extends the tradition of historical reinterpretation of the Palace, whose halls have witnessed major episodes in European collecting.
This intervention is divided into such emblematic rooms as the library, ballroom, lounges of Empress Eugénie de Montijo and other spaces where the artist invites visitors to discover part of this journey through the nights and days at the palace. In this way, the exhibition offers a sensory and conceptual map in which each painting acts as a layer of a larger narrative: a conversation between the artist's personal time, the historical time of the place and the visitor's inner time.
In this exhibition, Sicilia evokes echoes of the Baroque, especially his vocation for meaningful accumulation, the revealing artifice and the construction of narratives that reflect each other, generating multiple and layered readings. This is combined with his usual attention to light, silence and the fragility of signs, researching the materiality of the intangible.
Image Credits:
- "When You Hug Me," "Don't Threaten Me," and "Qatari, Qatari" from the series "The Child's Song in the Dark" (2019-present)
- "Queen of the Dawn Night" from the series "The Dark Bottom" (2026)
- "Dawn Water Lily" from the series "The Dark Bottom" (2026)
- "Reconte-toi" (2019-present)
