The Contemporary Art Collection

Fernando Arriola and Yolanda Zugaza, award for collecting in Spain from the ARCO Foundation
Madrid, Jan 28 (EFE).- The Alkar Contemporary Collection (ACC) Bilbao, founded by Fernando Arriola and Yolanda Zugaza, has received the 'A' award for collecting in Spain from the ARCO Foundation, which has also awarded the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros collection an honorary award for its support of art.
According to a statement issued on Tuesday, the Foundation has considered that the Arriaga and Zugaza collection has been consolidated as a benchmark for contemporary art in Spain, with more than 450 works by 210 international and emerging artists (from Eduardo Chillida to Miquel Barceló and Georg Baselitz) and a wide range of disciplines such as painting, sculpture, photography, installation and video, reflecting the diversity and richness of contemporary artistic expression.

The honorary award went to the collection founded in the 1970s by Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and Gustavo Cisneros. The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (CPPC) has the mission of preserving and promoting the art and culture of Latin America and the Caribbean. Based in Caracas and New York, it has been chaired since 2008 by her daughter, Adriana Cisneros de Griffin.
It covers five main areas, highlighting Latin American geometric abstraction from the 20th century and the Orinoco Collection, which preserves the cultural expressions of indigenous communities in the Venezuelan Amazon. In addition, it houses works by artists who portrayed the Latin American landscape between the 17th and 19th centuries, colonial art from Venezuela and the Caribbean, and contemporary works by Latin American and Caribbean artists.

The 'A' award for International Collecting went to Juan Carlos Maldonado, a prominent businessman born in Venezuela, whose passion for art has led him to become a reference in the line of geometric abstraction.
His collection, started in 2005, has grown chronologically and geographically over time, including the core of geometric abstraction, contemporary, indigenous Ye'kwana from Venezuela and pre-Columbian from Peru. The artists that make up the collection range from Latin Americans, North Americans, and Europeans, such as Lygia Clark, Joaquín Torres García, Jesús Rafael Soto, Josef Albers, Leon Polk Smith and Max Bill, among others.

Another award is for Corporate Collection for the Fundació Sorigué, created in 1992 by Julio Sorigué and Josefina Blasco. His work began with a center for people with intellectual disabilities and years later he began the creation of his outstanding collection of contemporary art, recognized as one of the most important in Spain, and which began in 2000 with the donation of noucentista paintings by its founders.

Alex Ruas Wege, a young Brazilian interior designer who has lived outside Brazil for almost a decade and currently resides in Lisbon, is the 'A' International Young Collection Award winner. In addition to his interest in architecture, Alex is a passionate art collector, seeking to convey emotions and beauty through the careful curation of the collection.

The awards ceremony, which is in its twenty-ninth edition, will take place on Tuesday, March 4 at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, where the traditional ARCO Foundation dinner will be held afterwards, aimed at raising funds for the acquisition of works at ARCOmadrid 2025 for its collection, currently housed at CA2M Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in the Community of Madrid.
Source