Hortensia Herrero Art Centre, Valencia - CAHH - Centro de Arte Hortensia Herrero

Hortensia Herrero Art Centre, Valencia, Opening

11 November 2023

After more than five years of work and preparation, the CENTRO DE ARTE HORTENSIA HERRERO (CAHH) - Hortensia Herrero Art Centre opens its doors with the aim of providing a new window on contemporary art and bringing it closer to those who live in or visit Valencia. Located in the heart of the city, the building, with 3,500 square metres of exhibition space, will house a selection from the private collection of Hortensia Herrero, vice president of Mercadona and president of the foundation that bears her name.

Well known for her commitment to art and culture, the president of the Hortensia Herrero Foundation has been the driving force behind this project, and her vision and dedication have been crucial in making it a reality. Between the restoration of the building and the various interventions, both architectural and artistic, the cost of the project has come to 40 million euros.

“This is a wonderful day for me. Seven and a half years has been a long period of my life, a long period of work for the architects, for Carlos Campos, Carlos Barberá, the Mercadona team and my colleagues in the Hortensia Herrero Foundation, led by Alejandra Silvestre. At last this art centre is a reality”, began Hortensia Herrero. “One of the objectives of my foundation is to care for the city’s heritage, to bring to light the beauty of buildings that are our history and are in ruins. With this restoration I think that objective is being fulfilled. Add to that my art collection and I think we’re creating a cultural focus in Valencia for both residents and visitors to enjoy.”

On the building, Hortensia Herrero wanted to express her gratitude for “the work of the team of architects, and especially my daughter Amparo for the loving care and the hours she has put into this project. They’ve managed to adapt the unique features of the building, its nooks and crannies, its passages… to house great works. This is a little jewel in the heart of Valencia and they’ve brought out the very best in it.”

She gave an account of how her relationship with art began. “I’ve always enjoyed painting, art in general, handicrafts. I visited galleries, museums… and bought the odd picture, becoming a collector without realising. One day, Elena Tejedor, my fantastic project initiator at the Foundation, introduced me to Javier Molins while visiting Andreu Alfaro’s studio. With Javier we arranged the purchases so that everything was harmonious and made sense. That’s how we got involved in the world of galleries, fairs like Arco, Basel, Frieze, biennials like Venice. What with all this, we have some 50 artists represented in this art centre, some of them bought in Valencia galleries, thanks to Abierto València. In addition, we have six site-specifics. We selected six artists to make us specific installations for this centre, so that they would develop their creativity by embellishing it.”

Hortensia Herrero ended by thanking “my husband, because without the results he obtains from his company, it would not have been possible to make this happen. Thank you all from my heart. I hope you like it as much as I do.”

CAHH: A private collection of contemporary art

Hortensia Herrero has always has a special sensitivity to art and has been collecting artworks for more than ten years. The Hortensia Herrero Art Collection has a clear international orientation, with contemporary artists of recognised stature that can be found in the collections of museums such as MoMA, the Tate or the Pompidou Centre, among many others. The first presentation of this collection, with which the Hortensia Herrero Art Centre will open its doors tomorrow, Saturday 11 November, includes over 100 works by more than 50 artists.

Names like Andreas Gursky, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Anish Kapoor, Mat Collishaw, Cristina Iglesias, Manolo Valdés, Michal Rovner, Ann Veronica Janssens, Eduardo Chillida and Tony Cragg are just some of the more than 50 artists whose work will be represented in one of the seventeen exhibition rooms in the Hortensia Herrero Art Centre. They are accompanied by internationally renowned figures such as David Hockney, El Anatsui and Peter Halley, and the Spanish artists Miquel Barceló, Blanca Muñoz, Julio González, Antonio Girbés, Juan Genovés and Joan Miró.

Javier Molins, artistic director of the Hortensia Herrero Art Centre, is the collection’s adviser: “Not only have we brought in a series of outstanding names in contemporary art, but we’ve brought in the best work by these artists, because there’s been a high degree of involvement on their part. In many cases they’ve been asked to do something specifically for the art centre or we’ve waited for some time to find the piece that best fitted into the collection.”

Javier Molins began working on this collection with Hortensia Herrero a decade ago: “The collection and the centre that houses it are the product of two quite distinct yet complementary passions: on the one hand, the passion that Hortensia Herrero has always felt for art, which has prompted her to collect and put together a set of works of high quality, and on the other, her passion for the city of Valencia, which has led her to acquire one of its most representative buildings, restore it, bring to light a whole series of archaeological remains of the history of the city and open it to the public with her contemporary art collection. In this way, a very interesting dialogue is set up between the history of the city, starting in the Roman Empire, with its circus, part of which we can see in the subsoil of the building, and the most international contemporary art.”

Six site-specifics at the CAHH

The space that accommodates this exhibition, the former Palacio de Valeriola, has been restored by the ERRE Architecture studio. Moreover, the beauty of a unique historical space containing the whole history of the city has been enhanced by specific interventions in six corners of the art centre. These are six site-specifics, created by artists of international stature, that merge with the building. Jaume Plensa, who visited the CAHH during the restoration process, has intervened in the apse, which connects the mansion to the garden. The “navel” of the building — melic in Catalan, as Plensa himself dubbed it — now has its walls inundated with letters and symbols in various alphabets from all over the world. Tomás Saraceno has created an installation comprising six clouds composed of irregular tetrahedrons and dodecahedrons and covered with iridescent panels, which completely fill the sixteen-metre-high entrance hall. Sean Scully has intervened in the former chapel of the Palacio, filling the space with colour. Scully suggested carrying out a comprehensive transformation of the chapel that would include both the windows in the walls and the glass in the dome. His intervention was completed with one of his paintings from the Landline series, characterized by horizontal stripes in various colours. Cristina Iglesias has transformed the connection between the main building and the annex, so that visitors will be able to feel they are inside her work. Olafur Eliasson has brought to life another of the passages in the building, creating a tunnel with two quite distinct perspectives: the view at the entrance, in which we can see 1,035 pieces of glass, each with a different design and position, containing all the colours of the rainbow, and the view looking back from the exit, where we see a black tunnel. Finally, there is Mat Collishaw, whose work is characterized by treating classical themes from art history with modern technology. Hortensia Herrero was fascinated by the video Sordid Earth created by Collishaw for Rod Arad’s curtain (which Hortensia Herrero herself brought to Valencia in the summer of 2022), so she commissioned him to produce a video specially for the art centre. She slipped in the idea that it could be inspired by the Fallas of Valencia, another of this patron’s great passions.

In short, they are six interventions that not only enter into a dialogue with the space but end up being integrated into the building itself and further enhancing its uniqueness. All these works will remain in the art centre permanently, enriching its architecture and investing this building with soul.

Supporting the Valencian art ecosystem: the Abierto València room

As the art centre is situated in Valencia, Hortensia Herrero was determined not to forget the city’s more emerging art and its gallery ecosystem. As Javier Molins explains, the Valencian patron “first started collecting in her own city by acquiring artworks by the artists who exhibited in its galleries for her own enjoyment in the privacy of her own home. It is a practice that she has continued over time and has institutionalized through the acquisition prize she awards every year as part of the event known as Abierto València (Open Valencia), with which the galleries of Valencia launch the September season. From 2014 to 2022, twenty-one works by sixteen artists have been added to the Hortensia Herrero collection through this acquisition prize, and two rooms in the CAHH have been fitted out to show a selection of these works acquired in the galleries of Valencia.”

CAHH: A unique space

As if the selection that forms this first exhibition were not enough, its container, the actual building that houses the Hortensia Herrero Art Centre, is a work of art in itself. It is located in the former Palacio de Valeriola, an iconic construction in a Baroque style which encapsulates the history of the city, from Roman, Visigothic and Islamic times to the Christian era: a space like few others in Valencia in which to see and admire the past. Moreover, a fragment of the Roman circus of the ancient city of Valentia has been found in the subsoil.

The site was part of Muslim Balansiya between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, and remains of two fountains belonging to an Islamic patio have been found in it. One of them has survived in good condition and can be viewed by visitors to the art centre. This eight-pointed fountain, and the other, which is more damaged, stood at either end of the pool in a large courtyard with a border of plants, framed by channels around the perimeter and rotundas at the corners, through which water circulated.

This courtyard belonged to the large Islamic house of Haçach Habinbadel. It also constitutes the last vestige of the Jewish quarter, as can be seen in an alley that lies within the art centre and has also been recovered for visitors to enjoy. Later on, the construction of the Palacio de Valeriola became a showcase for the opulence of Valencian Baroque society.

The restoration of the building, which was in a very advanced state of dereliction when Hortensia Herrero acquired it, was undertaken by the ERRE Arquitectura studio. Amparo Roig, one of its three partners, also took part in the presentation of this new exhibition space:

“We fell in love with this building, even though it was a ruin. A ruin that was lucky enough to catch the eye of Hortensia Herrero, with unstinting investment of time, cost and loving care. And in order to breathe life into the building, ensuring its continuity over time. From the outset we aimed to recover the original character of the existing building, reinforcing the most damaged parts, of which there were many. We’ve brought out the original atmosphere of the seventeenth-century palacio while achieving an exhibition space with the modern facilities it deserves. We hope and wish that this new chapter in the history of the Palacio de Valeriola, from now on the Hortensia Herrero Art Centre, will serve to promote contemporary art of the highest level and to highlight the great value of Valencia’s architectural heritage”, explained Amparo Roig.

The exhibition area is organized around seventeen rooms distributed on four levels. One of the main challenges of the project was to design a continuous walkthrough that would offer visitors a pleasant and comfortable experience throughout an area of over 3,500 square metres. This walkthrough follows an ascending course in the Calle del Mar building and descends in the second section, adjacent to Calle de San Cristóbal, connecting with it via the building situated in the garden. The complex is completed with a landscaped courtyard, as well as a basement, where the remains of the ancient Roman circus of Valencia found during the archaeological excavations can be visited. This Roman circus was the most imposing structure in the city in the second century AD, with an area equivalent to more than three football pitches (350 metres long and more than 70 metres wide). During the excavations, several sections of the thick five-metre-wide wall of the western tiered seating area were located, another three transverse walls serving as braces, and seven buttresses on the outside of the wall. These finds have been preserved and will be open to visitors to the centre.

The restoration work has taken over five years, during which the aim has been to recover as far as possible the historical character contained in the Palacio de Valeriola, and at the same time to turn it into a leading contemporary art centre, with all the technological requirements that this entails.

CENTRO DE ARTE HORTENSIA HERRERO, VALENCIA

HORTENSIA HERRERO ART CENTRE, VALENCIA

Calle del Mar, 31 – 46003 València

www.cahh.es

Updated Post

From Picasso to Basquiat at Institut Valencià d’Art Moderne IVAM

Exhibition:
Fire under the Ashes. From Picasso to Basquiat
Institut Valencià d’Art Modern IVAM
5 May - 28 August 2005

Curator: Kosme de Barañano

The exhibition is based on the review of primitive art, or children’s art, carried out by numerous artists since Surrealism, which shaped the iconography of avant-garde art, both in Europe and in America, with respect to the human figure, the face and graffiti, in Constructivism, Art Brut, Informalism and the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. The selection of works in the exhibition traces the evolution and development of that imagery – that fire – in modern art through the work of such acclaimed artists as Jean Dubuffet, Michel Haas, Germaine Richier, Gaston Chaissac, Pablo Picasso, Joaquín Torres-García and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The title of the exhibition comes from some words quoted by Jan Krugier when recalling a visit to Rothko: “Rothko struck me as having something shamanistic about him – there was a truth in him that he had to express. I remember going to see him once late at night in his studio in New York. And while I was looking at his paintings, he came out with a phrase that really struck me: ‘If you are looking for fire, you will find it beneath the ashes.’ Fashionable painters aren’t looking for fire. They simply make pictures, and that’s it. Rothko found this phrase in a book he had in the studio by Martin Buber. It’s a very beautiful expression and I think it sums up the role that shamans play. They find fire beneath the ashes. They rediscover our truth and transmit it to us. It is a message that has to be delivered, that is absolutely vital – because, without that fire, we are nothing.”

The exhibition seeks to present a recurrent option in twentieth-century painting and sculpture, the application of the supposedly naive mark, free of cultural roots. In these works, or rather in the poetics of these artists, the mechanisms of memory go back to prehistoric graffiti, to the icon. Despite the very different poetics of these artists, they have a common denominator: the primitive appearance of the mark, a schematic mark or blot. Among the artists whose work makes up this show – Pablo Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joaquín Torres-García, Jean Dubuffet, Gaston Chaissac, Michel Haas, Germaine Richier and Louis Soutter, the last two of whom have never been exhibited before in Spain – there are common features, but the vocabulary is different; each one has a different rhythmic tension or linear precision, a different concision and constructive power. There are differences of texture, colour, phrasing and expression in all of them.

In all of them there is an economy in the mixture of colours and an economy in the marks used. They simplify the subject or lay it bare so as to give it the value of an icon. Sometimes their works look like drawing because of their simplification, their economy of style. The proposal or experiment is to master the figure with a simple construction, not expressive or connotative but formalized. One can see the recollection of certain signs or aspects of how to synthesize reality in a new image which have reappeared again and again since the palaeolithic caves. Ranging from Picasso to Basquiat, the exhibition assembles these signs or graffiti which come from prehistory and from the imagination of children. This influence on twentieth-century art of drawings done by children or the insane appeared in the work of Paul Klee or Louis Soutter, but also in the first almanac produced by the group Der Blaue Reiter in 1912 there were children’s drawings, together with works of African and medieval art.

Jean Dubuffet (Le Havre, 1901 – Paris, 1985) belongs to a group of painters whose aim was to move away from the influence of tradition and explore unknown techniques in order to recapture the “ancestral spontaneity of the human hand when making marks”. His paintings of pure form, sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract, with bold colours and deliberate clumsiness, recall the expressions of the mentally ill and children, although this does not mean that their style is less elaborate. Dubuffet plays with clumsiness, doodles and raw matter in order to go back to the origins of art. In 1948, together with the writer André Breton and Antoni Tàpies, he created the Compagnie de l’Art Brut, which was a focus for the work of marginal individuals, an undertaking that sought to open up the art world for children and people marginalized by society. Often causing outrage with his deliberately childlike style, he sought to seduce, to celebrate deformity and materials that repel at first sight. An inventor and provoker of talent, Dubuffet succeeded in teaching how to look at the world from a new perspective.

The work of Michel Haas (1934) comes from most of the contemporary trends concerned with new figuration, such as the London School, Abstract Expressionism in America and free figuration in France. His paintings seem to belong to a time that is not ours, indicating traces of the art of cave painting or the corroded fragment of a fresco which bears the bruises of history. His technique is based on the use of simple materials such as water, charcoal and glue. His work has evolved from an initial fluidity and transparency to a form of relief which solidifies and inscribes his forms more profoundly in the thickness of the paper.

The early works of Germaine Richier (Grans, 1902 – Montpellier, 1959) are classical in appearance. During the war she devoted herself to making clay models of rather unattractive animals such as bats or toads, which she deformed so that they looked like unfinished creatures, somewhere between the birth of life and catastrophe. At the end of her career she made painted plasters and bronzes. Her work La sauterelle (The Locust), with a woman’s head, does not correspond to a facile Surrealism but places the act of art above the conventional world. After the war, her violent, refined, cruel contemporary sculpture revealed new expressive possibilities for figuration to Giacometti and many later sculptors.

In the early years of his activity Gaston Chaissac (Avallon, 1910 – La Roche-sur-Yon, 1964) felt the fascination of a vocabulary that emerged from prehistoric forms. In the forties his work was characterized by thick profiles in black ink, the use of light colours and isolated strokes of watercolour, presenting scenes that conjured up the imagination of the child. Chaissac was a member of the Compagnie de l’Art Brut created by Dubuffet in 1948 as an attempt to seek a new line of innovation which would escape from academic art and “fine art”. The concept of Art Brut was defined then as a new stage of art, distanced from traditional art and cultural influences.

The inclination for caricature and the grotesque of Pablo Picasso (Málaga, 1881 – Notre-Dame-de-Vie, 1973) and the sense of irony of which he himself was often a recurrent focus are revealed in the caricatures of the works of his youth, in which he animalized faces and portrayed salacious and scatological situations. The works presented in this exhibition show the importance of caricature in Picasso’s art and how that unprecedented cross between caricature, children’s drawings, primitivism and fragmentation of classical forms led to what has been called the “Picasso style”.

Joaquín Torres-García (Montevideo, 1874–1949) received a classical training. During the time that he spent in Paris (from 1926 to 1932) he joined leading European avant-garde movements which enabled him to develop the basis for an art that he caused to evolve in a very individual way. In 1930 he and Michel Seuphor founded the Cercle et Carré group. Although Torres-García quickly moved away from the members of the group, the pure abstraction principles of Neo-Plasticism enabled him to develop his personal style: a language based on a system of geometrical relationships and a repertoire of pictograms. His Universal Constructivism, dating from his time in Paris, was based on the assembly, on a metal grid, of universal symbols taken from ancient and modern cultures, including Pre-Hispanic cultures, in which he showed special interest.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (New York, 1960–1988) was associated with the punk movement and channelled his need for self-expression into designing jewellery and painting clothes which he then devoted himself to selling. In this way he gradually completed his training on a completely self-taught basis, inspired by Picasso, African art, jazz and children’s drawings. His pictures are full of enigmas and discrete symbols which can only be deciphered by those who knew him well. An examination of his work reveals the frequency with which he provides the possibility of escape by painting icons that refer to the primitive tradition inherited from his family, and it shows his predilection  or striking, almost garish colours, as extreme as his existence. Also read on this blog the post about  Basquiat’s works exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, 2005 -

The exhibition includes both paintings and sculptures by these artists, emphasizing the primitivism that underlies them all, making this show a visceral visual experience.

To accompany the show, the IVAM has published a catalogue, illustrated with colour reproductions of the items exhibited, together with texts by the curator of the exhibition, Kosme de Barañano, and the poets Jaime Siles and Guillermo Carnero.