Museum of Contemporary Art Helga de Alvear

Most of the collections represent the people who have constituted them, that of Helga de Alvear tells us about her way of being and her experiences, but above all what she shows us is her life journey and her journey alongside contemporary art.

Helga de Alvear’s collection brings together an enormous plurality of artists who express themselves through very different artistic techniques and disciplines, offering us a multitude of approaches and sensitivities as a consequence of the plural and complex nature of our society. The artists question and reflect the times in which they have lived, address the dominant socio-cultural reality, as well as their personal worlds and their microcosms.

Helga de Alvear always acquires the artists she believes in, without worrying about fashions and trends, whether they are consolidated or not, avoiding common places and predictable names of speculation. Her double facet of gallery owner and collector has never clouded her intuition, her passion, her sense of commitment to herself: “I always exhibit artists that I would like to have in my collection. Only if I have enough passion for the artist’s work to include it in the collection can I spread that spirit and passion to third parties and encourage them to buy a piece by an artist who may be unknown to them. Many times before exhibiting an artist I buy some pieces for myself. It is the way to test that work and see if it is still interesting after living with it for a certain time. If every time I see it I get emotional, it means that the work has enough value to be exhibited in the gallery and encourage other collectors to buy it”.

Helga de Alvear has always had the need to share her love for art, to make her private universe public and to make the whole world participate in the intellectual and aesthetic enjoyment of her works. Helga not only shows her collection at the Foundation that bears her name in Cáceres, but it has also been the subject of numerous exhibitions in Spanish and foreign institutions and museums, so her collection not only has an internal history, the history of each work , the relationship they maintain between each of them, but is enriched by the history of the spaces these works have inhabited, and the stories that the various selections of the different curators have been telling, on this occasion as a result of the tribute to their Cordovan husband, Jaime de Alvear.

Organizers: Ayuntamiento de Córdoba, Delegación de Cultura y Patrimonio Histórico, Vimcorsa S.A. y Centro de Artes Visuales Fundación Helga de Alvear