In recent decades and following the rhythm set by the avant-garde, artistic currents have emerged and fed back on each other with fascinating speed, blurring the boundaries between the various trends that have shaped the current artistic landscape. The multiplicity of perspectives, cultural influences and individual visions that make up contemporary artistic practice, translucid through the infinity of styles and techniques that, as conceptual art has already shown us, have revolutionized its own notion. Artists such as Bernar Venet, Damien Hirst, Jan Fabre, Arne Quinze, David Lachapelle, open the door to a universe as intimate as it is collective, which manages to question the viewer in as many ways as their interpretations. Far from representing conventional plastic values, art is moving through a moment of rupture towards new paradigms that expand its limits beyond its traditional boundaries.

The collection and its artists

In the sculptural field, Bernar Venet’s monumental steel works, characterized by deep mathematical and scientific research, are a lucid example of the bridge that conceptual art builds to science and nature, urging viewers to reflect on the intersection between them.

The collection on sale introduces us to the fascinating Second Avant-Garde through its great protagonists: Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Alechinsky, Christo, Yves Klein and Nicky de Saint Phalle.

Around the decade of the 1940s, a vibrant period in the history of art began whose imprint on the world of creativity has had a decisive influence on the future development of artistic practice. The Second Avant-Garde brought with it a second wave of innovation, rupture and transgression that, from the First Avant-Garde, leads us on a stimulating journey through an absolutely transformative 20th century.

After World War II, a period marked by misery and unrest began, as it could not be otherwise. The horrors of the war wreaked havoc on a political and social level but also defined the new challenges that artistic practice had to face. The failed utopian project of the pre-war avant-gardes and the emptiness caused by the loss of referents translated into a new form of representation dominated by a feeling of tearfulness in which aesthetic enjoyment as it had been understood until then, loses its traditional conception. The political and cultural crisis that shook Europe caused the world’s artistic capital, which until then had been Paris, to move to New York. However, as can be seen in this collection, the polarity between the two creative centers energized and encouraged the artistic practice of this fertile and creatively intense period in which different styles and movements followed one another at a frenetic pace.

At the same time, the COBRA group, represented in the collection by artists such as Karel Appel and Pierre Alechinsky, saw in the primitive art of children and the mentally ill, as well as in surrealist automatism, the most authentic example of free and original art. approaching in this aspect to Dubuffet’s artistic conception. However, unlike the latter, his works are often more visceral due to the influence that German expressionism exerted on them.

Continuing with abstract artistic expressions and in the midst of the triumph of American expressionism, Op Art burst onto the scene. with an opposite premise to that of abstract expressionism: while in the latter the relevant aspect was the relationship between artist and work during the act of creation, figures such as Vasarely put the focus on the spectator, who with his or her action of looking completed and gave meaning to the work.

As a reaction to these movements stripped of external references, Pop Art and New Realism emerged on both sides of the Atlantic. While Pop, led by Andy Warhol, turned triviality into a subject worthy of aesthetic treatment and monumentalized it through the technique of enlargement, reflecting the icons of mass culture in an intelligent and critical way, the new realism of Yves Klein or Niki de Saint Phalle was born to reclaim the return to the social and the human being as the essential subject of art.

As a whole, this collection of art from the second avant-garde is a testament to the power of art to challenge, inspire and transform. Each work is a window to a world of infinite possibilities, where imagination is the only limit. It is a reminder that art not only reflects reality, but also redefines it.