Cristina Garcia Married | Salamanca (EFE).- The DA2 contemporary art center in Salamanca has doubled its own collection by adding more than 400 works by 250 Spanish and Portuguese artists, donated by the Coca-Cola Foundation and which will remain permanently in the city.
This is the Foundation’s contemporary art collection, which since 2007 has been housed in the DA2 and whose works have been used in temporary exhibitions along with the center’s 293 own, sources from the Salamanca City Council have explained to Efe.
The DA2, which after this donation has 697 own works, was inaugurated in 2002 when Salamanca was the European Capital of Culture and is part of the Salamanca City of Culture and Knowledge Foundation of the City Council.
The center does not have a permanent exhibition, but new temporary exhibitions every three or four months. With the works of the Coca-Cola Foundation, it has organized a total of 23 since it houses these funds in its facilities, with the particularity that all the artists are Spanish and Portuguese.
The 404 works donated to the DA2 are paintings, photographs, sculptures, drawings, installations and videos, in the same way that the 293 from its own original collection are also works in all types of supports and formats that reflect the main currents of contemporary art.
“The entire Coca-Cola collection has never been shown in the complete museum, but we have been exhibiting different works in temporary exhibitions, also some outside of Salamanca, especially in the Canary Islands,” municipal sources have explained to Efe.
Spanish and Portuguese avant-garde art
The Coca-Cola Foundation decided to create its own collection of contemporary Spanish art in 1993, with emblematic works from the second half of the 20th century and new creative proposals by young artists. The vocation was to represent Spanish and Portuguese avant-garde art.
It is a selection of contrasts that seeks to promote the artists of the last decades. Among the authors are Eduardo Arroyo, Eva Lootz, Jose Manuel Broto, Lara Almárcegui, Patricio Cabrera, Miguel Angel Campano, Ricardo Cavada, Victoria Civera and Chema Cobo.
The delivery of this collection to the Salamanca City Council, now owner of the works, was signed this Wednesday between the mayor of the city, Carlos García Carbayo, and the director of the Coca-Cola Foundation, Beatriz Osuna.
The mayor celebrated that this donation “enriches the cultural heritage” of Salamanca and contributes to “promoting the City of Culture.” Osuna, for his part, wanted the collection to have “maximum visibility and local roots.”
Bet on the audiovisual
The DA2 exhibition program focuses above all on the latest trends developed since the 1990s, and also accommodates emerging artists from the city and Castilla y León, such as Pablo Alonso, Javier Núñez Gasco, Paloma Pájaro, Fernando García Malmierca and Sun Martinez.
In recent years, the center is especially committed to artists who work with video and new audiovisual media, which is why it has several rooms set up to maintain a permanent program with this type of work.
The DA2 tends to combine individual exhibitions by national and international artists of reference who work with all kinds of supports and languages (Mona Hatoum, Lorna Simpson, Tony Oursler, José Bedia) with specific individual projects by young international artists that are still little known in Spain ( Chris Cunningham, Shoja Azari, Tom Hunter, AK Dolven, Clare Langan). EFE