Fundación Telefónica

• Fundación Telefónica
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The Telefónica Group Art Collections

The commitment to modern and contemporary art, via the relationship between art and technology, is the driving force behind management of Telefónica’s artistic and cultural assets. These holdings, which constitute one of Europe’s most important corporate artistic collections, consist of five collections of work by prestigious artists from different artistic movements, the management and maintenance of which has been entrusted to Fundación Telefónica.

In 2008, the Telefónica Group and Fundación Telefónica reaffirmed their commitment by expanding and circulating these heritage collections, so that they could be visited by hundreds of thousands of people in both Spain and Latin America.

The Collection of Spanish Modern and Contemporary Art
Created between 1983 and 1988, the initial exhibit of this collection, is rated by critics as one of the best examples of corporate collecting. It reclaimed attention for a group of twentieth century Spanish artists, who were exceptional for their timelessness and international impact. The goal was to bring together significant examples of each one’s work. At present, the collection has 84 pieces including paintings, drawings and sculptures by artists as significant as Luis Fernandez, Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, Eduardo Chillida and Antoni Tàpies.

The Cubist Collection
This collection presents cubism as an important contemporary art movement stretching over time in different geographical and cultural areas. The collection consists of 41 works produced between 1912 and 1933 and contains pieces by 19 artists (14 European and 5 Latin American) associated in different degrees and ways to this movement, including Juan Gris, Maria Blanchard, Albert Gleizes, André Lhote, etc. This collection can currently be seen in the travelling exhibit entitled “Cubism and its Environment in the Telefónica Collections" which visited Santiago, Chile, Buenos Aires and Neuquén, Argentina in 2008.

The Collection of Contemporary Photography
This collection currently has 78 works (276 pieces) from 48 international artists of the utmost international prestige, artists  such as Cindy Sherman, Andreas Gursky, Axel Hütte or Bleda y Rosa. The collection was created in 2002 when Fundación Telefónica decided to include a  of twentieth century component into its art collections: photographs taken for artistic rather than purely documentary purposes. These works offer a broad example of the two main paths of photography over the past thirty years, the new European objectivity and critical postmodernism.

The Telos Collection
This collection began in 1985 from originals specifically ordered by Fundación Telefónica for publication in the magazine Telos, Notebooks of Communication and Innovation and it now has 418 works on paper from 43 contemporary Spanish artists such as Antonio Saura, Hernandez Pijuan, Josep Guinovart, Eduardo Úrculo, Soledad Sevilla, Luis F. Benedit, Jose Maria Sicilia, Luis Feito, etc.

Telefónica’s Historical Photographic and Film Archive
This archive contains some 20 films and 12,872 photographs by the most important Spanish graphic reporters of the twentieth century. Alfonso and Luis Ramon Marín, among others, form part of this collection,   considered to be one of Spain’s most important groups of documentary photography from this period. A selection of these imagenes is on exhibit now, titled “Transformations. Spain in the Twenties from the Photographic Archives of Telefónica". This exhibit went on tour to Seville, Logroño and Huesca in 2008.

The five art collections are of the maximum   artistic value and are coveted internationally, testified by the numerous requests for exhibits and loans received continuously from institutions and museums worldwide. In 2008 three of the main art centers in Spain -the Reina Sofa National National Art Center (MNCARS), the Valencian Institute of Modern Art (IVAM) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (MACBA) enjoyed  a 61-piece collection of art for one more year. In addition, another 16 works have been lent to nine cultural institutions in Spain, Germany and Italy, such as the Thyssen Museum in Madrid, the Guggenheim Museum in Berlin and the Turin Gallery of Art, etc. .

Zero Interest Loans from the Collection of Contemporary Spanish Art:
- 27 works by Chillida, Fernández, Gris and Tàpies on loan to the Reina Sofia National Museum of Art.
- 16 works by Chillida and Tàpies on loan to the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona.  
- 18 works by Gris, Picasso and Chillida on loan to the Modern Art Institute of Valencia