Artistic gems from the collection of Antonio Pérez Simón are on display in Madrid

Madrid. Of the more than 4,000 works of art in the collection of businessman Antonio Pérez Simón, of Spanish origin, who has lived in Mexico since he was a child, 70 of the most representative and valuable ones traveled to Madrid to form part of a temporary exhibition at the CentroCentro cultural center, among them some gems by artists such as Rubens, El Greco, Canaletto, Goya, Van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Mexicans Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. This exhibition is the first step in a long-term and larger project, which is the opening of an exhibition space in the Spanish capital that will be the permanent headquarters of that valuable heritage.

The exhibition Seventy great masters from the Pérez Simón collection It is a journey through the history of art from the 15th century to the present day. Through these selected works, we can trace a brief history of the ups and downs of painting schools, aesthetic evolution and the great milestones in the history of humanity.

Pérez Simón personally presented the exhibition, in which he recounted that from a very young age, when he did not even suspect that he would become a multimillionaire businessman, he was captivated by works of art, mainly due to a trip to Europe during his youth, for which he had the budget. 8 dollars a dayhe said.

Since my youth I have been attracted by beauty, by works of art. Since I could not afford to 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 on his canvas the sublime, the poetic, the beautiful, even the terrible.he said.

Crucial parts of vital movements

In this way, little by little, one of the most important private art collections in the world was created, not only because of its number, but above all because it has some crucial pieces from some vital artistic movements to understand the figure of a painter or historical period. Currently, the collection is made up of more than 4 thousand works of painting, sculpture, drawing and manuscripts, in addition to numerous pieces of decorative art, and is completed with a library made up of more than 50 thousand volumes, with a documentary collection that supports the collection itself.

Pérez Simón was born in Asturias, Spain, in 1941, but at just five years old he was taken to live in Mexico, where he became one of the most important businessmen in the telecommunications sector together with his partner and friend Carlos Slim. As his fortune grew, so did his collection of art and books, to which he has dedicated a good part of his life and his money.

The collection is physically located in three places, in Mexico City, where the majority is, but also in New York and Madrid, and many of its most prized pieces are on loan to museums, as is the case with the Diego Rivera painting that traveled to Madrid, Aqueduct, Oil on canvas painted in 1918, which Pérez Simón acquired at an auction in the United States and later loaned to the San Diego Museum in California.

Among the maestros The works of Lucas Cranach are part of the exhibition. The Old Man, Bronzino, Rubens, El Greco, Murillo, Anton Van Dyck, Canaletto, Tiepolo, Goya, Turner, Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Pissarro, Gauguin, Sisley, Monet, Renoir, Joaquín Sorolla, Ignacio de Zuloaga, Edvard Munch, Tamara de Lempicka, Fernand Léger, Rothko, René Magritte, Alex Katz, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. One of the most celebrated pieces of the exhibition was The roses of Heliogabalus, by the Dutchman Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who painted it at the end of the 19th century.

Those responsible for selecting the works were the curators Graciela Téllez Trevilla, Susana Martínez-Garrido and Roberto Fernández Castro, who explained that in the case of Frida Kahlo’s paintings, Tehuacan girl, and that of Manuel Arellano from 1690, Our Lady of Guadalupe, They have a temporary permit from the Mexican authorities to stay out of the country for a year.

The general coordinator of Culture at Madrid City Hall, María Josefa Barrero, explained that negotiations are still ongoing between those responsible for the collection and municipal authorities to open a permanent exhibition centre for Pérez Simón’s collection, which would house between 200 and 300 pieces; most likely they will be rotating, to gradually show all the works.

We have set the second half of next year to begin the remodeling work on the space and the adjacent streets and squares.as Pérez Simón’s intention is for the exhibition centre to be fully integrated into the city. The remodelling works will be paid for by the businessman.

The temporary exhibition at the CentroCentro in Madrid opens today and will end on January 12.