Helga de Alvear, the collector who founded one of Spain’s best known galleries, has died.
De Alvear started buying art in 1967, first from a gallery owner friend, Juana Mordó, who she went on to work with in 1980. On Mordó’s death in 1984, de Alvear took over. In 1995 she opened her eponymous dealership, taking premises at Calle Doctor Fourquet 12, next to the Reina Sofia Museum, in Madrid.
In the intervening three decades she has come to represent artists including Ángela de la Cruz, Elmgreen & Dragset, Thomas Demand and Isaac Julien.
De Alvear continued to collect ‘with my eyes, not my ears’, she was wont to say, amassing 3,000 works. These she promised to the city of Cáceres, on the proviso a museum could be built to showcase them in. In 2021 Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Helga de Alvear opened in its Mansilla + Tuñon-designed home.
Born in the German city of Kirn, near Frankfurt, de Alvear arrived in Spain in 1957 to study Castilian and Spanish culture at the Complutense University of Madrid. In 1958 she married the architect Jaime de Alvear Criado, who died in 2010.
