Centro de Artes Visuales Fundación Helga de Alvear

One of the most important new contemporary art museums in Europe, The Museum of Contemporary Art Helga de Alvear in Cáceres, Spain, designed by award-winning Tuñón Arquitectos Studio, will open in spring 2021. The museum was created to house Spain’s most significant private collection of international contemporary art developed over 40 years by the leading gallerist and collector, Helga de Alvear. 

The collection of works by more than 500 artists from five continents will be donated to the city by Helga de Alvear. It includes outstanding work by Joseph Beuys, Dan Flavin, Joseph Albers, Paul Klee, Nan Goldin, Jenny Holzer, Anish Kapoor, Philippe Parreno, Gordon Matta-Clark and many others, which the public will be able to experience for free in a space that was specially designed to show them.

The new museum brings together the original Helga de Alvear Foundation’s 1913 Casa Grande building, the restoration of which formed the first stage of the project, with a major new extension which includes spacious galleries and exhibition spaces. The new building is sited on an imaginary line that separates the medieval historic centre of Cáceres, a World Heritage Site, from the modern part of the city, thus creating a route between past and present. In the words of the architects: "The project tries to listen to the place, and imagine a possible city that, without renouncing our time, is capable of preserving the way the city breathes".