In Spain, David Chipperfield Architects Transforms a Historic Bank into Faro Santander
With redesigned interiors and works by Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, and more, the institution’s leadership is aiming to create a cultural hub in northern Spain
In the late 1930s, British painter Leonora Carrington found herself living an idyllic life in a farmhouse in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche with her partner and fellow Surrealist Max Ernst. World War II destroyed that: Ernst, arrested for being an “enemy alien” due to his German citizenship, was interned, and Carrington fled to war-torn Madrid. There she was raped by Spanish soldiers, and as her mental health deteriorated, her industrialist father had her committed to a sanatorium in the north, in Santander, Spain.
Carrington was unable to access the paint she needed because of the war, so she turned to drawing to channel her feelings of despair. She managed to create two small oil paintings in Santander, both filled with whimsical half-human, half-animal creatures. One, which she gifted to her doctor, Luis Morales, has remained in the possession of his children for nearly a century, until they finally agreed to exhibit the painting at the newly opened Faro Santander for the exhibition “The Symptomatic Surreal,” on view until January 31, 2027.
The Morales family finally offered the painting for public view because of its connection to the city. “I think they had to admit that it would not make sense to tell this Santander story and not have this painting,” Faro Santander director Daniel Vega Pérez de Arlucea told Galerie.
Fundación Santander tasked British architect David Chipperfield with redesigning the interiors of Faro Santander, located in the Pereda Building, the former headquarters of Banco Santander, a neo-classical structure built in 1923. Chipperfield connected the two formerly separate sides of the building. “The question was, how to occupy the arch and connect the buildings together while maintaining the sort of urban quality of the arch, because the arch was always something that spoke to the city in a way,” Chipperfield told Galerie. The new art institution adds another destination to the Cantabrian city, alongside Centro Botín, the art space founded by the Botín family, which also owns Banco Santander. “We want to position ourselves as one of the big players in Santander, and to do so in a very collaborative manner,” said Vega.
Faro Santander’s opening also brings another important part of Mexican art history to the city, with Modern Mexico in the Gelman Santander Collection on view until January 10, 2027, featuring several paintings by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera alongside other Mexican Modernists like María Izquierdo, Rufino Tamayo, José Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Gunther Gerzso, and Francisco Toledo. The exhibition opens with a stunning portrait of patron Natasha Gelman sprawled on a blue chaise in an odalisque pose, with bunches of calla lilies filling the background. Fundación Santander was able to access Natasha and Jacques Gelman’s collection of Mexican modern art thanks to a special agreement with the current owners. “There are always people coming back and forth [between Santander and Mexico], and many people of Santander and Cantabrian origin still living in Mexico,” explained Vega Pérez de Arlucea.
Upstairs, Banco Santander’s collection of masterworks fills the fourth floor. The current curation, on view until February 2027, ranges from a 17th-century oil on canvas of Samson and the Lion by Peter Paul Rubens and El Greco’s 1614 depiction of the Annunciation to British artist Richard Long’s 1945 piece Circle of Standing Stones and a 1990 marbled, crescent-shaped alabaster sculpture by Basque sculptor Cristina Iglesias.
Faro Santander also features a creative learning center; a state-of-the-art digital cube, which currently shows the history of the bank; Marasma, a section open to the public that will showcase local creatives; and a rooftop garden, café, and restaurant with stunning views of the city and the coast.
Faro Santander is the second point of a triangle of art destinations in the city, after Centro Botín, which is currently exhibiting a drawing retrospective of works by Marisol, and the upcoming Reina Sofía Santander. Exhibition programming could range from Old Masters to contemporary. “We are not trying to do what others are already doing, and we feel very strongly that the vision of our program is very complementary with what already exists in Santander, and in that sense, if we can really turn Santander into one new cultural bow in North Spain, that would also be one of the checks we want to see in the future,” said Vega Pérez de Arlucea, who added, “Everything that is taking place is really rooted [in the city], and I think that makes the model in Santander really genuine and different from other cities.”