This is how some businessmen created a museum collection

O Contemporary Art Collection (CAC), one of the most important private collections in Spain and a pioneer in its patronage model, celebrates its 35th anniversary on the second floor of the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid.

An origin. The forging of a collection covers the pulse of a historical moment embraced by enthusiasm and the desire to preserve and disseminate the history of 20th century Spanish art. A unique opportunity to discover what we were.

1987. Year of the attack on Hipercor and the bang real estate. Latest Movida scams. The Intellectual Property Law is approved while big names like Cy Twombly or Le Corbusier shine on the exhibition stage. Rosina Gómez Baeza takes over the management of ARCO with the clear objective of promoting collecting. Institutional aid flourishes and the market flows.

They created an “artisan collection”, looking for pieces that are difficult to locate even outside of Spain

That same year, and as an exemplary case ahead of its time, the president of Unión Fenosa, Julián Trincado, brings together 30 large companiessuch as Bodegas Vega Sicilia or Zara, with the aim of creating collections of Spanish art that contribute to the conservation and dissemination of our artistic heritage.

Each company would contribute 8 million pesetas and the acquisitions would be grouped into lots of equal value that would be drawn at the end of the year. Thus, the collection grew to group more than 1000 pieces and continues to expand, embracing the most representative artistic movements to date.

The Associação Coleções de Arte Contemporânea (ACAC) was created as a type of investment fund at the service of a future Reina Sofia museum under the protection of three renowned experts, Julián Gállego, Antonio Bonet Correa and Simón Marchánwho created, as the latter described, a “craft collection”, looking for pieces that are difficult to locate on the secondary market and even outside of Spain.

But relations deteriorated in 1990. Then began the search for a definitive destination for the CAC, which finally went to the Patio Herreriano Museum in Valladolid whose creation, 20 years ago, was designed from the beginning to house these pieces.

[Collections with expiry date]

In the year 2000, it was signed a mission on baila regulatory agreement between the City Council and ACAC by which the latter also transfers the Legacy of the Angel Ferrant (Madrid, 1890-1961), the artist's entire personal archive which, incidentally, is also currently on display at the museum, establishing a path of continuity in post-dictatorship artistic practices.

An origin. The forging of a collectionthe exhibition commemorating the 35th anniversary of the collection covers, through more than 50 works by 30 artists and across four rooms, a new modernity that draws on the enthusiasm of the avant-garde and art of the 80s and 90s.

The exhibition boldly and sensitively rewrites new stories for Spanish art

Quoting the art critic Quico Rivaswhich defined the links between pictorial praxis and its historical time as a production “between emotion and rule”, thus this exhibition oscillates between abstraction and minimalismthe vindication of sculpture and the internationalism of new pictorial practices, in a slow cartography of iconic pieces that question traditional accounts of art history, highlighting, for example, the prominent role of sculpture in those years.

The color of the call hatch “figuration of Madrid” with painters who refuse the figuration of pop surrealist assumptions, they represent a collective yearning for modernity. Highlights the freshness of the missing Patricia Gadeawho combined the language of the comic with authentic representation, or of Luis Gordillo any Carlos Alcolea.

The adjacent room, warmer, presided over by a sculpture of Jorge Barbia very long tool that articulates the grammar of the ochers of Manolo moans or the beautiful abstract composition of jos guerrero 1965 titled Andalusia.

Room 5, dedicated to sculpture, features an exquisite assembly of excellent pieces, such as the Traffic in Marco Angelsa black rubber passage that dialogues with the famous piece of Eva Lootz open circuit. It is complemented by the protein designs of Pepe Espaliu and with a beautiful constructivist sculpture in iron Angel Bados. The harmony between the pieces is perfect.

The room dedicated to the permeability of our painting in the face of international movements, room 8, exudes a growing interest in the trans-avant-garde and the school of the German “new savages”, where painting is filled with radical forms, imagination and freedom and tells the enthusiastic pictorial account of Menchu ​​​​Lamas, Miquel Barceló or Martin Kippenbergerthat show the quality and diversity of painting from the 80s.

The one focused on minimalism –the one that also exudes a greater inclination towards the norm–, is introduced by Manuel Barbadillo and its link to the Calculation Center of the Complutense University of Madrid.

[Collecting, holidays and market in the digital era]

an origin not only illustrates a zeitgeist generational, valuing our heritage, but boldly and sensitively rewriting new stories for Spanish art.

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