Helga de Alvear

The Board of Trustees of the Helga de Alvear Foundation has communicated this morning the death in Madrid of the gallery owner, collector and promoter of the Museum of Contemporary Art that bears his name in Cáceres. He was born in Kirn/Nahe (Germany) in 1936 and trained in various Swiss and British centers before he was in Spain to learn Spanish. He married then with the architect Jaime de Alvear, with whom he would have three daughters: María, Ana and Patricia.

Asidua of the Prado Museum, art began to collect in the mid -sixties, after meeting Juana Bordó, in whose gallery he worked years later, and coming into contact with the abstract artists who then converged around Cuenca and with those linked to the El Paso group. From the hand of Bordó, he deepened his knowledge of contemporary creation and the work involved in the management of a gallery; At death, in 1984, of that marching of Greek origin, he took over his space for a decade, until in 1995 he decided to open a new gallery with his own name; His headquarters, very wide, stood next to the Reina Sofía Museum, in Doctor Fourquet. He opted from that moment on photography, video and installation and for the dissemination in Spain of international authors.

If its gallery has a solid career since then and has participated in the main European fairs, its collection grew in parallel and to host it and open it to the public promoted alvear the opening in Cáceres of the museum that bears its name in 2021 (before it was the center of Visual arts and was born after the constitution of its foundation, already in 2006). Recently this space has signed a collaboration agreement with the Reina Sofía Museum; Sandra Guimarães, its director, said today that Helga de Alvear will be forever remembered for his admirable generosity and his essential role in the development of the Spanish and international artistic context. Helga was a visionary leader who had an indelible impact on the artists he worked with, on the teams of his museum and his gallery, in his colleagues, in his numerous friends and worldwide. Helga always valued art and its relations with artists above all, put all their effort and love to make the dream of building a museum and chose as a home for its collection the city of Cáceres, being the main defender of the project until The end. In a totally selfless way she managed to realize the creation of a foundation and a museum whose impact has enriched and enrich the lives of thousands of people through art. Thanks to its generosity and its strong commitment to society today we have one of the most relevant international contemporary art collections in Europe and we can continue working to fulfill their dream: transform people’s lives through art. Helga de Alvear has its own place in the history of contemporary art.

Among the awards he received are the Extremadura Medal in 2007, the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts of the Ministry of Culture in 2008, the Cross of the Civil Merit of the German Federal Republic in 2014, the international medal of the arts of the Community of Madrid in 2020 or the Medal of Cultural Merit of the Portuguese Republic of 2024. The City Council has decreed three days of mourning and soon its foundation will announce new public tributes.

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