CentroCentro de Madrid (Plaza de Cibeles, 1) presents until next 12 January 2025 the exhibition Seventy Great Masters of the Pérez Simón Collection, which brings together some of the most valuable pieces of this remarkable set, Today, it is considered one of the most important private collections in the world. The exhibition offers a careful selection of works, most of them never seen in Madrid before.
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 journey divided into three thematic sections. Ancient and early modern masters includes works by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Bronzino, Rubens, el Greco, Murillo, Anton Van Dyck, Canaletto, Tiepolo and Goya, among others; XIX century includes pieces of the most relevant painters of the time, including Turner, Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Pissarro, Gauguin, Sisley, Monet, Renoir, Joaquín Sorolla and Ignacio de Zuloaga; in From the Vanguards to the Present Art are present artists such as Eduard Munch, Tamara de Lempicka, Fernand Léger, Rothko, René Magritte, Alex Katz, Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara.
The collection consists of more than 4,000 pieces of painting, sculpture, drawing, decorative arts and manuscripts. It is completed by a library of more than 50,000 volumes, with a documentary collection that serves as the basis for the Collection itself.
The businessman and collector Juan Antonio Pérez Simón was born in Asturias in 1941, from there he emigrated to Mexico with his parents at the age of 5. The origin of his collection dates back to 1964 when, as he himself recalls, he made a trip to Europe “which defined my intense and indissoluble bond with the plastic arts and gave me a norm for their enjoyment”. In this journey, Juan Antonio Pérez Simón spends his time and a large part of his budget, just 8 dollars a day, to visit all those museums that guarded the works of art he admired most. As he himself explains: “Since my youth I was attracted by beauty, by works of art. As I could not buy them, I hung in my bedroom reproductions of the paintings. It satisfied my desire to enjoy the way in which each artist captured on his canvas the sublime, the poetic, the beautiful, even the terrible”. Since then, Juan Antonio Pérez Simón has never ceased his search for beauty and has developed his collectionistic impulse to gather, fruit of the effort over these years, a unique collection in the world. More information and entries at this link.
