The Legacy of the Great Artists of the 20th and 21st Century
Important private collection
Collecting art is one of the most exciting, complex and enigmatic activities that human beings have developed since time immemorial. But what motivations move a certain individual to dedicate part of his or her vital and economic resources to the purchase of art in a passionate, constant and conscious manner?
In this respect, the extraordinary group of more than 100 works that will mark a before and after in the national art market is a paradigmatic example of a contemporary art collection, forged on the basis of a meticulous research work developed over two decades with an expert eye and a passion and artistic sensitivity that translucent in each work. In this sense, the creator of this anthological collection of works shows us, once again, that any good collection should be understood as an entity in continuous development that evolves as our understanding, knowledge and interests evolve.
With a scientific background, but with an innate intuition and creative spirit, our collector was initiated into the exciting path of the contemporary art world as a result of his growth as a professional in the world of advertising. His travels around the world gave him the opportunity to discover what he calls “art in motion”, that which, in the midst of the hustle and bustle and frenetic pace of cities like New York, is capable of transforming everyday life. In fact, it was precisely in New York City when the sight through his airplane window of the thousands of undulating saffron-colored scarves that Christo had installed in his “Gates” in Central Park sparked a need to experiment with contemporary art, which led to his irrepressible passion for collecting.
Talking with him, we became aware of the deep significance he gives to the fact of collecting and, therefore, of the transcendence and impact that art has had on his life. The epiphany he felt after his encounter with Christo’s work made him understand the transformative capacity of art, whose power transcends the merely aesthetic to touch the most intimate layers of the human psyche.
In this respect, each of the meticulously selected works embodies a narrative, a story waiting to be discovered and interpreted anew with every glance, constantly evolving as we do. In fact, the relationship established between art and science through many of the great artists that are part of the collection, is another example of the indivisible link that for him exists between life and art, acting as two sides of the same coin that feed back and enrich each other.
The collection, developed in a time frame ranging from the second avant-garde to the most current artistic expressions, is, as a whole, a fascinating account of the legacy that artists of the caliber of Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, Keith Haring, Christo, Jean Dubuffet, Karel Appel, Pierre Alechinsky, Peter Haley, Damien Hirst, Bernar Venet, or Jan Fabre have given to the most recent history. The wide range of media, from painting and sculpture to installations, conceptual art and photography, find a solid and revealing representation and become not only a vivid testimony of the evolution of artistic practice, but also evidence of our own evolution as a society.
After the end of the Second World War, a new stage shook the artistic panorama: the second avant-garde began and with it a fertile and creatively intense period in which different styles and movements followed one another at a frenetic pace. The political and cultural crisis that ravaged Europe caused the world’s artistic capital to move from Paris to New York. In this sense, the collection we present here reflects and encourages the dialogue established between the artistic proposals of both capitals. From the hand of artists as decisive as Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Jean Dubuffet, Keith Haring, Sam Francis, Pierre Alechinsky, Victor Vasarely, Christo or Ives Klein we begin an exciting journey that introduces us to informalism, following with pop art, kinetic art or new realism until we reach the irruption of conceptual art.
In recent decades and advancing at the pace set by the avant-garde, artistic currents emerged and fed back on each other with fascinating speed, blurring the boundaries between the various trends that have shaped the current artistic landscape. The multiplicity of perspectives, cultural influences and individual visions that make up contemporary artistic practice, translucid through the infinite number of styles and techniques that, as conceptual art has already shown us, have revolutionized the very notion of art.
