A still life full of food and an image in which food disappears and can only be filled, virtually, based on solidarity donations. The Queen Sofía Foundation presented this Thursday the "The message behind the painting" campaign, an initiative to raise funds at the start of the 2023 grana collection for the Food Banks, supported by the King's mother, present at the presentation of the campaign based on a painting donated by the late Colombian painter Fernando Botero.
The exhibition with which the campaign begins can be seen in the Centro Centro space, located inside the Cibeles Palace, from November 23 to December 10, and consists of two significant parts. Side A features the Colombian artist's original work, Still Life, a still life depicting a table overflowing with food. Side B, thanks to the intervention of photographic retouching, reveals the opposite reality: the food shortage that many families face, highlighting the important work carried out by Food Banks for those who need it most.
Admission to the exhibition is free, and those visitors who wish, through a QR or Bizum code, will be able to contribute to the charity objective by donating funds to fill the table with Botero's painting. The mayor of Madrid, Jose Luis Martínez-Almeida, attended the campaign presentation event, held at the Cibeles Palace in Madrid (seat of the city council); the treasurer of the Spanish Federation of Food Banks (FESBAL), Gregorio Pérez Calvo, and the son of Fernando Botero, Juan Carlos Botero.
The involvement of the Reina Sofía Foundation in the Food Bank movement has led Queen Sofia to visit several of the entity's headquarters in different cities in Spain. In recent months he has been to the premises of Tarragona, Plasencia (Cáceres), Palma (Mallorca), Oiartzun (Gipuzkoa), Segovia, Zamora, Roquetas de Mar (Almería) and Tenerife, in addition to attending the meetings of the federations of food banks in Spain, Europe and worldwide. From the Reina Sofía Foundation, funds are transferred to banks both to alleviate emergency situations and to finance logistical means to expand the entity's solidarity actions.
