Where to buy art in Spain: shops, galleries, fairs and commissions

Spain's decorating magazines agree on the look. El Mueble named the single XL canvas the living-room trend of 2025, in place of the gallery wall, showing works of 150 × 100, 160 × 120 and 165 × 132 cm above the sofa. ¡HOLA! puts it simply: a big painting decorates better than many small ones, as long as it is no wider than the sofa. Over a three-metre sofa, that leaves room for a canvas of two metres or more.

Finding one is the hard part. A Madrid buyer asking on a Spanish forum for large paintings, not prints, found prices high and suitable sizes scarce; the replies pointed to emerging artists, galleries and fairs rather than anonymous online canvas shops. Sound advice for one statement piece; for a whole flat, a villa or a set, start from the wall and work back to the seller.

Spain's gallery trade is concentrated: Madrid holds more than 40% of the art market and Catalonia about a quarter, while home and décor shops sell in every town. The size column shows where each seller stops.

Madrid's year turns on ARCOmadrid. The 2026 edition brought 211 galleries from 30 countries, a third of them Spanish and almost as many Latin American, and drew 95,000 visitors to work by some 1,300 artists. Smaller fairs such as Art Madrid and JustMad add to the choice.

A fair is a weaker place for a big wall. A stand at ARCO is a large outlay, so galleries bring what sells easily; one Madrid gallery director told the press she asks all her artists for small or paper works so that they stay affordable. In Barcelona, two gallerists see international buyers taking the place of older local collectors. If your wall is large, ask whether the artist you like takes commissions, and at what size. To see paintings inside finished rooms, visit Casa Decor in Madrid in spring: the 2025 edition filled more than 50 designed spaces on Calle Sagasta, with canvases of 100 × 140 and 110 × 195 cm on their walls.

The coast buys differently. One national estate agency reports that foreigners make up 70–90% of luxury buyers in the prime areas of the Costa del Sol and Costa Blanca, and their villa designers seldom sell art: a round-up of ten leading Marbella interior designers mentions no art or artwork sourcing in any profile.

Where to look: Marbella Design & Art each autumn, which in 2024 hung art through more than 3,000 m² of the city's Palacio de Ferias; Art Cologne Palma Mallorca each April, with 88 galleries from 20 countries in 2026, 14 of them from Mallorca; and the galleries of Palma, Marbella and Ibiza. The walls that define a villa, a double-height hall in La Zagaleta or a finca living room under a four-metre ceiling, are beyond most fair stands, so brief them with the furniture rather than after it. How furnished and branded villas handle art is on Spanish villas and homes.

Spanish listings use a few words that are easy to misread. Lámina is a print on paper. Lienzo names the material and is often a printed canvas. Decorado a mano or con texturas can mean a print with brushed gel on top. Pintado a mano, óleo sobre lienzo or acrílico sobre lienzo claim the whole picture was painted. Three checks before you pay:

• Look across it. Hold a phone torch low to the surface: paint leaves ridges and brush marks that cast tiny shadows and never repeat exactly; a print is flat, or carries the same stamped texture all over.
• Look closer. A phone's zoom shows a print as a grid of dots; paint shows layered strokes.
• Ask how it was made. A painter can send photographs of the canvas half-finished; a reseller of stock usually cannot.

With iHomeArt there is nothing to decode: every canvas is painted by hand, nothing is printed, and you see photographs or video at each stage, with a side-lit shot of the texture if you ask. See our textured paintings.

Spain's museums shape its taste. The Prado received almost 3.5 million visitors in 2024, and the Sorolla centenary drew more than 2.5 million visits to 43 exhibitions. Museum shops sell prints; copy shops sell painted versions of the favourites in the sizes they keep.

A painted copy works best when it is made for the wall. A Sorolla beach for a seaside dining room, a Sánchez Cotán or Zurbarán still life for a library, or a Goya tapestry cartoon for a period salón can each be painted by hand, scaled to your wall at the original's proportions, in acrylic as standard or oil on request. Picasso, Miró and Dalí are still in copyright, so we need the rights holder's permission before painting their work; the usual alternative is a design in the same spirit. For Sorolla's light and sea, browse our impressionist paintings.

Spanish law gives you 14 calendar days to withdraw from an online purchase without giving a reason, but not for goods made to the buyer's specifications or clearly personalised. Spanish online shoppers rank a simple returns process and clear delivery costs as their top expectations; on a commission, the equivalent is agreeing the size, the medium and progress photographs before work starts.

That is how an order with iHomeArt works. Send a photo of the wall with its width and ceiling height; we suggest a size and a shortlist from some 1,300 designs, or design a piece for your project, and one canvas can come first if you are planning a set. Each stage is photographed or filmed and the next starts only once you approve; you approve the finished canvas from a photograph before it ships, so finished pieces are not returnable. Transit damage is rare, under 0.01% of pieces: we take it up with the carrier and work out a solution with you, such as a replacement or a refund. Sizes are in the Spain size guide, the overview in our Spain wall art guide.

Each canvas can travel stretched and ready to hang, framed, or rolled; a rolled canvas, the lightest and most economical way to send a large painting, arrives without stretcher bars, and any local framer can stretch it for you.