Art is becoming an ever more important element of major real estate developments, and this is especially true in hotels, where visitors want to feel that they’re not just crashing at an Airbnb but pampering their bodies and eyes in between bouts of participating in the culture of destination cities. Globally, many hotels are crafting unique artistic experiences, but perhaps no new hotel has done it better than the Four Seasons Madrid, which boasts a collection of 1,500 bespoke works of art in its public spaces and rooms. We recently had the opportunity to tour this collection with its curator Paloma Fernández-Iriondo and to ask her how this sterling selection came together.
The hotel opened in 2020 and you were brought onto the project fairly early because the developers wanted to have a strong art collection from the outset. Why was art such an important component in the development of the hotel?
Four Seasons Hotel Madrid is part of a large operation to rehabilitate seven historic buildings located in the heart of the city in a test of how past and present can coexist in the 21st Century—much as the art of the past and the present can be complementary in a collection. That idea was at the root of an art project I developed for six years in parallel to the transformation of the historic buildings, visualizing the project in the context of the 200 rooms, common areas, corridors, restaurants and other spaces. I started from zero, as one always starts when building large collections, but my experience at Sotheby’s and helping to create one of the most relevant collections in Spain—the Villar-Mir Cultural Fund Collection—was a prelude.
There was always the goal of bringing art closer to citizens, but we also hoped to launch careers and to give importance and relevance to artistic fact as a fundamental part of our lives and our experiences. The idea was to form a collection of Spanish art, with an emphasis on emerging creators, that would show the work of these artists and project it outside the limits of Madrid and even beyond the borders of Spain.
Today, hotel guests are looking for unique experiences and want to get up close and personal with the cultures and art of the places they visit. Four Seasons Hotel Madrid provides that through the works of Spanish artists, both emerging and recognized, displayed on the walls of the hotel—like an immersive art gallery. Notice the seamless manner in which the artworks fit into their surroundings… how naturally they harmonize with the architecture and design language.
How did you come to the idea of populating the hotel’s art collection through competitions and partnerships with the local art universities?
The goal was to assemble a collection of Spanish art, taking advantage of our privileged setting in one of the most important hotels of the international Four Seasons chain to highlight their work globally. In 2015 Centro Canalejas Madrid and the Fine Art School of the Complutense University of Madrid entered into a partnership to organize the annual ‘Visual Arts Competition,’ which has been held five times to date and was extended to the fine art schools of the universities of Málaga and Seville in 2018. Everyone understood that exhibiting the winning students’ work at the hotel would give them a level of visibility and national and international attention unlike anything ever seen before on the Spanish art scene. Five hundred proposals were submitted to the competition, and the seventy-three that received prizes saw their art become an integral part of the collection.
The hotel boasts 1,500 artworks in unique configurations installed across the various floors and room types. I realize you’re drawing from a big pool, but what are some of your favorite pieces in the collection?
I have worked so much with the art collection, and the selection of the works has been so thoughtful that I must say that all the student artists should be mentioned. Working closely with the artists allows you to better appreciate their work, as is the case with Sandra Val’s site-specific work, Hybrid Garden, an intervention carried out on the roof of the Isa restaurant, and Starry Night, an installation of 1,500 brass petals by the artist Eduardo Perez-Cabrero. The works of the great wood and stone sculptor Jose Cháfer and many others have made it possible for the Four Seasons Hotel in Madrid to have an art collection with a distinct character.
I’ve been asking big picture questions; on a smaller scale, what feeling did you seek to create in the individual rooms or types of rooms?
I knew this art collection was intended for the eyes of visitors—newcomers to Madrid and an audience interested in discovering a rich culture and finding new experiences in it. The art had to grab the attention of these spectators, make them stop and look, pique their curiosity and inspire them. The artworks needed to be pleasant, serene and subtle in the guest rooms; rhythmic, dynamic and surprising in the long corridors; monumental and stunning in the large common areas; and so on for each different part of the hotel.
The hotel also features reproductions of works from the San Fernando Fine Art Royal Academy and the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum. What were the challenges in pairing these classic works with the newer ones?
To exhibit reproductions of old artworks is a testament to Spain’s brilliant artistic past, and integrating those works in a twenty-first-century collection housed in a nineteenth-century building was a very attractive idea. Thanks to the collaboration agreement with Centro Canalejas Madrid and the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, a large quantity of nature-themed plaster bas-reliefs now adorn the hotel’s two hundred rooms, adding a touch of classicism to a contemporary art collection that ties in perfectly with the classical style of the ornamental architectural elements found throughout the building.
A shared passion for art has united the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Four Seasons Hotel Madrid in a joint initiative to make selected masterpieces of modern painting available to the public. As a result, exquisite reproductions of sixteen paintings from the Madrid gallery are now on display in the most emblematic areas of the hotel. These reproductions were made on the same support surface as the originals (paper or canvas) and, in most cases, have the same dimensions and even replicate their frames. The selected works by ten different artists range from Impressionism to the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century.
The hotel also has plenty of art in its restaurants, Dani and Isa. How is it different curating for a restaurant as opposed to curating for other public spaces?
Working with the interior design studio BAMO in San Francisco, Martin Brudnizki in London and AvroKO in New York allowed me to better understand how art, far from losing prominence, is an important part of interior decoration. Dani and Isa have their own art collections, a result of a fluent exchange of ideas. For the collection in Dani Brasserie, I worked closely with the international firm Martin Brudnizki Design Studio. After constantly bouncing ideas back and forth, we came up with the final proposal that featured graphic works by renowned Spanish masters like Antonio Saura, Luis Feito, Manolo Valdés and José Guerrero—including a print by Josep Maria Sert after the mural he painted in the Council Chamber of the League of Nations in Geneva. The diversity of styles, periods and artists is underscored by the variety of supports and frames used, chosen with painstaking care: each frame, simple or incredibly ornate, made of brass, gold leaf or other materials, was selected for a particular work.
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Isa restaurant, designed by the New York studio Avroko, features works with Asian influences, some of them site-specific. One wall of the restaurant, lined with imposing boiserie, captures the spirit of collecting in a display of ten reproductions of works from the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza divided into two groups that characterize that collection: portraits and abstraction.
Though it wasn’t designed specifically for it, it feels like the KAWS in your lobby responds well to the architecture of the space, a former bank. Would you say that’s your most popular piece?
Along The Way is a larger-than-life-size sculpture from KAWS’ Companion Series, created in 2013. The piece is a work of juxtapositions, contrasting vulnerability and strength, whimsy and monumentality, and modern and traditional, making it the perfect choice for this historical environment. Art is becoming the focal point of our already spectacular lobby, and people have been coming to the hotel just to see the new sculpture.
It’s visually very contemporary but represents traditional and enduring values of collaboration, cooperation and support for one another. It’s fitting that this ultra-contemporary piece should be housed in such a historic building—a perfect contrast of old and new. The sculpture was loaned to Four Seasons Hotel Madrid by Mark Scheinberg, founder of the global investment company Mohari Hospitality and co-owner of the Centro Canalejas Madrid building where the hotel is located.
