Seventy great masters from the Pérez Simon collection

Description

Seventy Old Masters from the Pérez Simón Collection brings together some of the most valuable pieces from this remarkable collection, considered today to be one of the most important private collections in the world. The exhibition offers a careful selection of works, most of them never before seen in Madrid.

The exhibition has been curated by Graciela Téllez Trevilla, Susana Martínez-Garrido and Roberto Fernández Castro, who have articulated the selection of works in such a way that it offers a tour divided into three thematic sections. Old Masters and Early Moderns includes works by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Bronzino, Rubens, El Greco, Murillo, Anton Van Dyck, Canaletto, Tiepolo and Goya, among others; 19th Century includes pieces by the most important painters of the moment, including Turner, Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Pissarro, Gauguin, Sisley, Monet, Renoir, Joaquín Sorolla and Ignacio de Zuloaga; In From the Avant-garde to Contemporary Art, artists such as Eduard Munch, Tamara de Lempicka, Fernand Léger, Rothko, René Magritte, Alex Katz, Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara are present.

The Pérez Simón Collection is made up of more than 4,000 pieces of painting, sculpture, drawing, decorative arts and manuscripts, and is considered today to be one of the most important private collections in the world. It is completed with a library made up of more than 50,000 volumes, with a documentary collection that supports the Collection itself.

The businessman and collector Juan Antonio Pérez Simón was born in Asturias in 1941, from where he emigrated to Mexico with his parents at the age of 5. The germ of his Collection dates back to 1964 when, as he himself recalls, he made a trip to Europe “that defined my intense and indissoluble link with the plastic arts and gave me the rules for their enjoyment.” ​During this journey, Juan Antonio Pérez Simón devoted his time and a large part of his budget, which was barely 8 dollars a day, to visiting all those museums that housed the works of art that he most admired. As he himself explains: “Since my youth I was attracted by beauty, by works of art. Since I could not buy them, I hung reproductions of the paintings in my bedroom. In this way I satisfied my desire to enjoy the way in which each artist captured the sublime, the poetic, the beautiful, even the terrible on their canvas.” Since then, Juan Antonio Pérez Simón has not ceased in his search for beauty and has developed his collecting drive until, as a result of his efforts over the years, he has assembled a Collection that is unique in the world.

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