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Daniel García Andújar: 'El capital. La mercancía. Guilloché' [Capital. Merchandise. Guilloche, 2015] (detail) 

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Detalle del cuadro 'Ceres o Pomona y Vertumno' (1626), de Juan van der Hamen y León
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Contemporary Art Collection
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2021/09/16

Works by Juan Van der Hamen, Hannah Collins and Ibghy & Lemmens in latest Collection Highlights update

The Collection section of the website includes a Highlights subsection which features works from very different periods in very different styles and formats that showcase the diversity of the art collection built up by the Banco de España since the late 18th century.

Two of the works selected for the latest update of the Highlights come from the contemporary part of the collection —White Passage (1994) by Hannah Collins and Each Number Equals One Inhalation and One Exhalation (Table 3) (2016) by Ibghy & Lemmens— and the third is from the classical part, though it was acquired via a donation by Juan de Zavala in 1968:

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(1626) by Juan van der Hamen y León, a Madrid-based painter of Flemish ascendancy.

Juan van der Hamen y León: Ceres or Pomona and Vertumnus (1626)

This last work depicts a theme traditionally linked to the end of summer. Ceres and Pomona are fertility goddesses associated with fruit trees, flowers and vegetable gardens. A woman in Baroque-period noble dress is offering a piece of fruit to an old man on one side of the picture. This suggests that the goddess depicted is probably Pomona, because this seems to be the scene recounted by Ovid in his poem Metamorphoses, in which the god Vertumnus disguises himself as a harmless old man to gain entry to the garden where Pomona has taken refuge from the men hounding her. His purpose is to gain her confidence and then attempt to seduce her.

Alfonso Pérez Sánchez and Carlos Martín describe this as a key piece in the oeuvre of Juan van der Hamen, and one that was probably meant to be paired with his An Offering to FloraAbre en nueva ventana (1627), which currently hangs in the Prado. The iconography of the two works is certainly strikingly similar. The canvas shows all the characteristic traits of van der Hamen's style: he was known mainly for his still-lifes in oils (the Banco de España Collection holds three such works: Still-life with fruit and sweetmeats,

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and

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). On the one hand compositional elements such as the general layout and the way in which the background landscape is painted hark back to late 16th century Flemish painting. On the other, the sharp contrasts in the light are clearly drawn from the naturalist tenebrism of Caravaggio, one of whose earliest followers in Spain was precisely van der Hamen.

Hannah Collins: White Passage (1994)Hannah Collins: White Passage (1994)

The second selection is White Passage by British photographer and film-maker Hannah Collins. Roberto Díaz explains that since the late 1970s Collins has worked in many different disciplines, but has focused mainly on photographic images and investigating what makes them meaningful. This particular work is part of a set in which she seeks to reformulate the Baroque vanities to some extent. She builds up scenes deeply charged with metaphor, taking tables and still-lifes spread across white cloths as her starting point.

White Passage depicts two tables covered and joined by a great white cloth. Both are topped with piles of turf from which a number of plastic tubes emerge. The photo was taken in 1994 and acquired by the Banco de España in 2001. It was included in Hannah Collins' book Finding, Transmitting, Receiving (2007), in which it was linked to her series Ghost, which also extends her poetic research into memory, the passage of time and the fleeting nature of lifeIbghy & Lemmens: Each Number Equals One Inhalation and One Exhalation (Table 3) [2016]Ibghy & Lemmens: Each Number Equals One Inhalation and One Exhalation (Table 3) [2016]

The third work selected is the installation Each Number Equals One Inhalation and One Exhalation (Table 3) by Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens, two Canadian artists in whose projects reflections on the economy and work play a fundamental part. This work in progress is a case in point. It was begun in 2016, following on immediately from the installation The Prophets.

The series held in the Banco de España Collection comprises seven small sculptures in a style with hints of constructivism. Architectural and sculptural form is given to images that represent productivity. The crafted models of these small, fragile sculptures contrast sharply with the authoritarian scale of the graphics from which they take their point of reference. The work shows how those graphics can turn complex ideas about human work into systemised forms and thus help to reproduce, expand and naturalise the productivist logic of capitalism. The criticism implicit in the installation extends to its title: Yolanda Romero explains that the artists are alluding to the reduction of human labour to quantified units, and perhaps also to the notion expounded by the Russian economist Bulgakov that the economic cycle can be seen as a metabolic process similar to the alternating movements of breathing out (production) and in (consumption).

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