con el corazón en la mano at Museo de Malaga

This summer, the Museo de Málaga becomes a visceral echo chamber with the exhibition With

the Heart in Hand. Anatomy and Judgment, curated by Fernando Castro Flórez.

At its core stands Enrique Simonet’s celebrated canvas And He Had a Heart! (1890), which serves as both anchor and trigger for a selection of seventy works by twenty Andalusian artists.

Through painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation, and performance, the show examines corporeality, identity, power, and memory.

The curatorial strategy works by juxtaposition: Simonet is not a relic but a spark. His anatomical drama converses with works that question gender norms, expose structures of inequality, and reimagine the body as a symbolic terrain. Ángeles Agrela, Pilar Albarracín, Santiago Ydáñez, and Juan Francisco Casas contribute perspectives that range from the intimate to the monumental, the ironic to the tragic.

The result is a choreography of tensions, compelling visitors to ask what it means today to truly hold a heart.

The exhibition shines in its coherence: the alternation of formats and scales establishes a rhythm that avoids both monotony and dispersion. Some viewers less versed in contemporary art may crave more interpretive guidance, yet the show provides enough visual and emotional triggers to sustain engagement, so that they can live their own experience and let the exhibition wake up their very own emotions.

The Museo de Málaga: a collection in dialogue

An oasis to get lost in art.

To grasp the resonance of this temporary exhibition, one must place it against the museum’s permanent holdings. Its Fine Arts collection highlights nineteenth-century painting, with a special focus on Andalusian and Malagueño schools. Simonet’s masterpiece shares space with works by Murillo, Morales, and Pedro de Mena, as well as modern presences such as Picasso. This body of work crafts an identity narrative—local yet universal—that illuminates the roots of today’s sensibilities.

Equally striking is the museum’s archaeological collection, comprising more than 15,000 objects spanning from Prehistory to the Islamic era. Roman mosaics, Phoenician grave goods, Paleolithic remains, and finds from the Cueva de Nerja inscribe Málaga within a millennial lineage. Visitors may move from a Phoenician tomb to a contemporary installation and recognize that dilemmas surrounding the body, death, or memory are not confined to our era but echo throughout history.

A heartbeat across time

With the Heart in Hand thrives on this tension between antiquity and the contemporary. It is not an isolated gesture but another chapter in the ongoing dialogue between pictorial tradition, the archaeology of the human, and today’s critical languages. Above all, it reveals that the Museo de Málaga does not merely preserve; it pulses. It is a living space where Simonet’s heart beats alongside present voices demanding to be heard.

A necessary, vibrant exhibition that positions Málaga firmly within the contemporary reflections on body and moral judgment. A heartbeat with universal resonance.