11 Reina Sofia Museum Best Artworks

A visit to the Reina Sofía Museum is a must if you are visiting Madrid. It is located in the former general hospital building next to Atocha station and forms part of Madrid's art triangle alongside the Prado and Thyssen-Bornemisza museums.

It houses more than 18,000 pieces of 20th-century and contemporary art by famous artists such as Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, and is open every day except Tuesdays and some public holidays. Here is a list of the 11 must-see pieces at the Reina Sofía, one of the best museums in Madrid and Spain.

Pablo Picasso's painting Guernica is the museum's masterpiece, the one that attracts the most visitors and is the most admired. This impressive painting, over 7 metres wide and 3 metres high, depicts the suffering caused by the German bombing of the Basque town that gives the painting its name, in the unmistakable style of the Malaga-born artist.

Picasso painted it in 1937 to form part of the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition. Although the state bought it that same year, the artist decided to donate it to the Moma in New York to protect it from the Second World War that was ravaging Europe at the time.

It was not until 1981 that Spain recovered the work and in 1992, with the opening of the Reina Sofia Museum, it arrived at what is still its home and where thousands of visitors flock to see this impressive work. Without a doubt, it is worth booking a ticket to the Reina Sofia Museum just to see Guernica.

• Author: Pablo Ruiz Picasso.
• Date: 1937.
• Location: Room 205.10 of the Reina Sofia.

Salvador Dalí is one of the most unique and eccentric artists ever known. And one of his most eccentric works, if you'll pardon the redundancy, can be found at the Reina Sofia Museum. It is called The Face of the Great Masturbator.

This autobiographical work, as Dalí himself acknowledged, reflects the author's deepest sexual obsessions through a painting with the painter's unique surrealist style. The artist depicts himself in the painting in several scenes.

His inspiration for this painting, as for many others, was his muse Gala. Salvador Dalí painted the picture in 1929 while enjoying Gala's company in Cadaqués, even though she was already married to the poet Paul Éluard.

• Author: Salvador Dalí.
• Date: 1929.
• Location: Room 205.13 of the Reina Sofía Museum.

Joan Miró was one of the most influential Spanish artists of the 20th century, as well as one of the most versatile, since in addition to being a painter, he was also a sculptor, engraver and ceramist. Although the artist himself experimented with various artistic movements such as Cubism and Fauvism, he has always been considered primarily a Surrealist artist.

The Reina Sofía Museum houses one of his most important surrealist paintings, known as Snail, Woman, Flower, Star. This painting belongs to a series that Miró himself called 'wild paintings', which emerged as a result of his fear of the rise of fascism and the pre-war period in Spain in 1934, the year in which this painting was created.

He represents this feeling through surrealist figures that give the work its name and dark colours. This is perhaps the artist's most famous painting of all those on display at the Reina Sofía.

• Author: Joan Miró.
• Date: 1934.
• Location: Room 205.04 of the Reina Sofía Museum.

Although Ángeles Santos is not a well-known name, her work Un Mundo is one of the most surprising in the museum. Born in Girona, she was unaware of the artistic trends in Europe in 1929, when she painted this canvas, so she surprised everyone with a groundbreaking, modern painting inspired solely by the magazines and publications of the time.

The 3x3 canvas depicts the imaginary world invented by the artist when she was just 18 years old, shortly after taking her first painting classes in Valladolid. Such was the admiration it aroused that it received praise from great figures of the time such as Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Jorge Guillén and Lorca. Today, visitors can be impressed by the painting on display at the Reina Sofía Museum.

• Author: Ángeles Santos.
• Date: 1929.
• Location: Room 205.06 of the Reina Sofía Museum.

Forgotten and overlooked for many years, Pablo Picasso's Woman in Blue is now one of the artist's most important works on display at the Reina Sofía Museum.

It was one of the first works painted by the artist upon his arrival in Madrid in 1901, when he was artistic director of the magazine Arte Joven, where he met several artists of the Generation of '98.

The painting, which depicts a courtesan of the time, was part of a series of illustrations Picasso created for the magazine, inspired by Van Gogh, El Greco and other great names. The artist donated this painting to the Fine Arts Exhibition in Madrid, after which it fell into oblivion for many years until it arrived at the Reina Sofía in 1988, catapulting the work to fame.

• Author: Pablo Ruiz Picasso.
• Date: 1901.
• Location: Room 201.02 of the Reina Sofía Museum.

Still lifes have always been a source of inspiration for many artists, including Juan Gris with his work The Open Window. It is part of a series of works inspired by what the artist saw through windows, with the painting on display at the Reina Sofía being the most complete of them all.

The views in the painting depict the place where he painted the picture, the town of Bandol sur Mer, on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea in the south of France.

Through his window he could see the sea and with that background he painted a still life with a very original composition. Its importance lies in the artist's ability to paint several independent scenes on the same canvas.

• Author: Juan Gris.
• Date: 1921.
• Location: Room 204.03 of the Reina Sofía Museum.

Between 1916 and 1922, Joan Miró decided to travel in search of inspiration. This quest led to a series of works depicting different landscapes in great detail. One of these works was entitled The House with the Palm Tree and is currently on display at the Reina Sofía Museum.

He painted this picture in 1918 while spending the summer in Montroig and decided to capture one of the landscapes that inspired him. There are a huge number of small details in the painting itself, which have led it to be considered one of the artist's first major pictorial milestones.

It is one of Miró's most important works from his pre-surrealist period, which began in 1923.

• Author: Joan Miró.
• Date: 1918.
• Location: Room 207.02 of the Reina Sofía Museum.

Contrary to popular belief, the young woman in this famous painting by Dalí is not Gala, but his sister Ana María. This painting of the Girl at the Window is one of many studies Dalí made of his sister.

If you book a guided tour of the Reina Sofía Museum, you will learn that the realism with which Dalí captures this canvas is striking, unlike the vast majority of works by an artist characterised by extreme surrealism.

His sister's calm and relaxed pose and the bluish colours convey a tranquillity that also contrasts sharply with the anguish evoked by other works. This is Dalí's masterpiece in terms of his studies of his sister and proof that Salvador Dalí also mastered painting in other facets beyond those for which he is known.

• Author: Salvador Dalí.
• Date: 1925.
• Location: Room 205.06 of the Reina Sofía Museum.

Hermen Anglada Camarasa was a modernist painter born in Barcelona, renowned for depicting scenes that inspired him on his numerous travels and for his style contrasting light and shadow and bright and dark colours. In this sense, his most famous work, or rather works, is Sonia de Klamery. I say works in plural because the author depicted this figure in two different paintings with two different poses, lying down and standing up.

In both, he depicts Sonia Klamery, a Russian ballet dancer whom Hermen admired, in two different poses and with his characteristic contrast between the pale colour of the female figure's skin, the colourful dress and the dark background.

Thanks to these and other works, Hermen Anglada gained worldwide recognition as one of the great modernist artists of the time for his representation of early 20th-century society.

• Author: Hermen Anglada Camarasa.
• Date: 1913.
• Location: Room 201.02 of the Reina Sofía Museum.

Antonio Saura was an artist born in Huesca in 1930 and a pioneer of the Informalism art movement in Spain. Together with other artists, he founded the El Paso group in Madrid, which brought together followers of this movement that began in 1951. The movement was characterised by painting using "smears".

After travelling to Paris, Antonio Saura began a series of works in this style. Many of them can be found in the Reina Sofía Museum, but the most notable is the one called Lola.

It is an almost abstract representation of a woman through thick strokes and black smears on white. One of the most important works of informalism in Spain.

• Author: Antonio Saura.
• Date: 1956.
• Location: Room 406 of the Reina Sofía Museum.

Georges Braque was a French artist whose career ran parallel to that of Pablo Picasso until 1914, when he enlisted to fight in the First World War. On his return, Braque took a different path to Picasso.

The canvas Cards and Dice is a representation of the games of chance of the time and is significant as one of Georges' last works in which he shares an aesthetic with Picasso. You can see it if you book your ticket to the Reina Sofía Museum.

The painting depicts different games of chance, such as cards and dice, in an oval on a table with a complex composition.

• Author: Georges Braque.
• Date: 1914.
• Location: Room 204.01 of the Reina Sofía Museum.