Hortensia Herrero Art Center. Valencia. Opening November 2023

Javier Molins is the artistic advisor of the Hortensia Herrero Art Center that will open in Valencia on November 2023. This Art Center will host the collection of Hortensia Herrero, a patron of the arts and Vice-president of Mercadona, Spains largest supermarket chain. Javier Molins has been the collection's artistic advisor since its foundation and has built the collection in close collaboration with Herrero.

The art centre will be housed in the Palacio Valeriola, a 17th century baroque palace, in the historic part of the city. Restored mindful of its architectural heritage, the palace together with a newly built annex, offers more than 3.500 square metres of exhibition space spread over 17 individual exhibition rooms. With the opening of the museum, Hortensia Herrero’s extensive private art collection becomes accessible to the general public for the first time, including half a dozen large-scale works commissioned specifically for the new museum.

Major living artists including Georg Baselitz, Tony Cragg, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, Anish Kapoor or Anselm Kiefer will have works on view as part of the collection presentation. Molins also commissioned seven site specific works that responded to the buildings architecture as new permanent features.

he exhibition Jaume Plensa: The Poetry of Silence, curated by Javier Molins, features the artist’s work from 1990 to the present day and highlights key aspects of his oeuvre as a sculptor and is structured around the connections between his creative universe and letters – from various alphabets – as the constituent element of his work. According to Plensa, every letter has a unique beauty, but together they illustrate the diversity of the world and the peaceful cohabitation between different cultures. As he himself explains, ‘a letter doesn’t look like much, it’s a humble thing, but linked to others they form words, and words form texts and texts, thinking’.

Literature has always been a wellspring of inspiration for Plensa. Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, William Blake, Baudelaire, T.S. Eliot, Elias Canetti, Vicent Andrés Estellés and José Ángel Valente are just some of the writers who have been important to him throughout his life and who have been sources on which he has drawn for countless of his works. Plensa’s relationship with literature, especially poetry, is the thread that runs through this exhibition, which will also include other themes that have been constants throughout his career, among them silence, dreams and desire, music and the family.

The exhibition, which includes almost a hundred large, medium and small-format sculptures, will be presented mainly in La Pedrera exhibition rooms, but it will also spread to other areas of the building, among them the rooftop, the attic, the inner courtyards and outside the building. In this way, Plensa’s work will engage in a dialogue with this iconic edifice designed by the architect Antoni Gaudí.

Another version of this exhibition could be seen in the Foundation Bancaja in Valencia, Spain.