Displaying items by tag: juan abello

On this, her first visit to Texas, Almudena Ros de Barbero is fully prepared for the state’s tendency to do things in a very big way.

But in this case, she’s the conduit to big by curating the first of two anniversary blockbusters at the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University. Say hello to “The Abelló Collection: A Modern Taste for European Masters,” which opened this weekend.

Ros is official curator of the private collection of Juan Abelló and his wife, Anna Gamazo, whom Meadows director Mark Roglán describes as two of the top collectors in the world.

Fear was the emotion that came to mind when Ana Gamazo was first approached about putting her private art collection on display.

Gamazo and her husband, prominent Spanish businessman Juan Abelló, had spent nearly three decades amassing some 500 pieces in a collection considered by Spanish curators to rank among the best in the world. But the collection had been guided by the pair’s personal taste, leaving Gamazo terrified of how revealing the exhibition would be. “What would critics say? What would people think of the art we own?”

The couple were eventually convinced and the Abelló Collection, currently on display at Madrid’s CentroCentro Cibeles, features 160 works spanning five centuries.

Seventy paintings that span the 15th to the 20th centuries from the collection of the Spanish investor Juan Abelló and his wife Ana Gamazo, including works by El Greco, Francisco Goya, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, are due to go on show in the US for the first time. “The Abelló Collection: A Modern Taste for European Masters” will open at the Meadows Museum at the Southern Methodist University in Texas next year, 18 April-2 August.

A key work in the show is Francis Bacon’s "Triptych," 1983, one of the artist’s final works in the format, which Abelló acquired in 2008 through a private sale.