Masters and rediscovers: the Abelló collection, in Málaga

Malaga,

The businessman Juan Abelló and his wife, Anna Gamazo, have one of the best-endowed private collections in our country and, although their collections correspond to a wide range of periods and styles, Spanish masters and artists scarcely represented in our collections take center stage. museums, like some members of the historical avant-garde or Francis Bacon. Names aside, the Abelló collection also stands out for having an important set of works on paper dated between the 16th and 20th centuries.

After a joint presentation of its main pieces a decade ago at CentroCentro, and some thematic exhibitions such as those dedicated to Madrid (Real Casa de Correos in the capital) or the color blue (Goya Museum), the Abelló collection is once again the center of a great exhibition, this time in Malaga: the Unicaja Foundation has inaugurated there “From Rafael to Bacon”, composed of just over sixty pieces by fundamental authors from the Renaissance to the present day, such as Berruguete, Rafael, Yáñez de la Almedina, Bronzino, Canaletto, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Manet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Modigliani, Dalí, El Greco, Murillo, Goya, Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Matisse, Romero de Torres, Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris, Rothko, Warhol, Millares or Antonio López.

From Raphael to Bacon. Masterpieces from the Abelló Collection. Unicaja Foundation Cultural Center, Malaga

In a tour curated by Conchita Romero, we are offered a walk through the history of painting, stage by stage and genre by genre: from the portrait (Rembrandt, Modigliani), to the landscape (Canaletto, Bellotto) or the still life (Cézanne and Manet ); As for the aforementioned projects on paper, we must mention a pastel by Degas or drawings by Gauguin and Van Gogh. Many of these works can be seen for the first time in Spain: this is the case of a portrait of Rafael, abstract compositions by Gerhard Richter or Josef Albers or the first sketch that Dalí made for his atomic leda, in which Leda (Gala) caresses a swan inside a pentagram inserted in a five-pointed star. She reappeared after seven decades in an unknown whereabouts, as was also recently recovered the youthful portrait of Isabel of Austria, who was queen of Norway, by the Master of the Magdalene Legend; Dating back to the 16th century, it is one of Abelló's latest acquisitions.

Furthermore, at the Unicaja Foundation Cultural Center in Malaga we can visit the first exhibition with which the Andalusian city joins the PHotoESPAÑA programming: “Hispanoamérica en motion”. It has more than a hundred images from Anna Gamazo de Abelló's own collections, dating back a century (from 1910 to 2016) and corresponding to fifty-six international photographers, including relevant names from Latin America such as Horacio Coppola. (Argentina), Tina Modotti (Mexico), Geraldo de Barros (Brazil), Lola Álvarez Bravo (Mexico), Alberto Korda (Cuba), Grete Stern (Germany-Argentina) and Paolo Gasparini (Venezuela).

Most of these photographs are documentary in nature, they focus on political and social issues and are torn between melodrama and expressive intensity; In this exhibition, which has been curated by Alexis Fabry, curator of these collections, regional particularities are transcended to promote a vision of the links between the nations of Latin America in the last century, of course in the field of photography, but also in daily life (the rumba, the nighttime celebration, the commitment to social improvements…).

Both exhibitions can be visited until August 18 and the proceeds (3 euros per ticket) will go to the Alhelí Association and the AGH Humanitarian Foundation. Free guided tours are offered, which can be reserved by emailing mediacionculturalmalaga@fundacionunicaja.com or calling 952 62 48 62.