BBVA and Centro Niemeyer are presenting Art and Spirituality. Imagining the Extraordinary, an exhibition organized by BBVA and curated by Alfonso de la Torre. The show comprises a carefully curated selection of the historical and contemporary holdings of the BBVA Collection in Spain, together with some works on loan from other collections, including video art.

Divided into four sections, the fifty or so artworks on display propose a meeting in which old masters dialogue with twentieth and twenty-first century artists, showcasing the breadth and depth of the BBVA Collection across various different supports and media, including painting, sculpture, photography and installation.

The exhibition Art and Spirituality. Imagining the Extraordinary in the BBVA Collection wishes to foreground the role that spirituality, understood from a universal anthropological viewpoint, has played in artistic creation over the course of the centuries.

Exploring themes such as religion, philosophy, light, energy, emptiness, silence, the sublime, metaphor and symbols, artists from different eras have pondered on the very purpose of creation and have tried to render in their work the inner transcendental aspect of what it is to be human, what gives meaning to our lives. Engaging with concepts hard to put into words, they endeavour to evoke the experience of the supernatural, inviting the beholder to “imagine the extraordinary” through an encounter with the work of art.