© René Magritte / VEGAP

A parade of disturbing figures with bowler hats, covered faces, impossible skies, and paintings within paintings make up the iconic cosmos of René Magritte, to whom until 30 January the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum devotes a major retrospective, the first to be held in Madrid since the year 1989. Curated by Guillermo Solana, the institution’s current artistic director, the exhibition stresses the repetition component of the oeuvre of the Belgian surrealist, who explored themes with an obsession that had him returning to them over and over again, in the process producing an infinity of variations which are fusions of the absurd and the mysterious.