A free exhibition at Madrid's CentroCentro brings together Cruz Novillo's designs, paintings, sculptures and sound works. It also shows how the creator of Spain's most familiar symbols built an art system based on numbers, color and time.
A panel of colored blocks greets visitors at CentroCentro, where Cruz Novillo's work fills the first floor of the Palacio de Cibeles. The Madrid exhibition opened on 8 October 2026 and includes around 150 pieces. Admission is free. It is the first show in the city to focus on Cruz Novillo as an artist and creator of sound works.
One work is set to run for 3.390.410 years, 31 days, 11 hours, 31 minutes and 12 seconds. That span reaches far beyond a human lifetime and gives the exhibition its strangest measure of time.
The work is a digital fragment of Diagrama dodecafónico 8.916.100.448.256, opus 14. An algorithm combines 12 colors, 12 sounds and 12 units of time into almost 9 trillion unique works. A new combination appears every 12 seconds. The project began at ARCO on 17 February 2010 at 12:00 and can be followed online with the elegiac sound of a cor anglais, Cruz Novillo's preferred instrument. As reported by Última Hora, its structure rests on the mathematical combination 1212.
Cruz Novillo died in Madrid on 1 May 2026, aged 89, while still working on the exhibition. The project, developed with him since 2025, therefore acquired a memorial character.
The artist gave the piece an ending that is exact and deliberately absurd. When the cycle finishes in almost 34,000 centuries, a cocktail will be served.
CentroCentro is not presenting a standard retrospective. Pepe Cruz-Novillo Jr., the artist's son, and Elena Fernández Manrique curated the show around the method behind the work. A drawing can become a painting, a fragment can become a sculpture, and the process can continue into sound and duration.
Cruz Novillo called these linked investigations
