Idiosincrasia

Helga de Alvear (Kirn, Germany, 1936) was recognized in 2010 as one of the 100 most important and influential people in the world of art in the famous list "Power 100". In the same year she opened to the public the Visual Arts Center Foundation Helga de Alvear in Caceres, with the exhibition "Margins of silence", a selection of 115 works from the Helga de Alvear Collection.

The exhibition I have designed based on the Helga de Alvear Collection is something like the invocation of the possibility of something that could be called a supergroup. Imagine, for example, that the presentation of a collection like this, in a specific community such as Caceres, is a unique opportunity to introduce into a homogenous group, conditioned by multiple cultural and economic affections and disaffections, another group: the works selected from the collection.

The function of this supergroup is to introduce an image of life beyond the norms and parameters that condition our view of the world. Without much attention to historiographical readings or to models of formal and interpretive relationships among the works, this exhibition simply states the importance of constantly cultivating coexistence with the monumental diversity staged by each of these artworks.

The term supergroup is chosen because, like an aphorism, it has a playful and productive absurdity, a wish to live in common, while it distances itself from a single feeling or thought about what culture must be in the future. This future depends on a feeling that can come about not so much by really assimilating what art wants, what the institution expresses through it, but through the greatness of having understood the importance of this constant exercise of generating differences within a tradition carried out by artists.

Photographs provided by the Visual Arts Center Foundation Helga de Alvear. © images: the authors.