As our contribution to International Women's Day, we present a brief look at works by three female artists which form part of the Banco de España Collection. We realise that our collection is somewhat lacking in works by women, so a large proportion of those commissioned and acquired in recent years have been by female artists. They include works by Sandra Gamarra, Fritzia Irízar, Mercedes Azpilicueta, Erlea Maneros, Teresa Lanceta and Patricia Esquivias. We are committed to continuing to increase the proportion via our acquisitions programme.

Detailed information on all the works acquired by the above artists will appear shortly in the Collection section of the website. Here, however, we are focusing on the three works selected for the March update of our Highlights section: QNJ (1993) by Berta Cáccamo, Children's Circle (1995) by Cristina García Rodero and Contract II (2016) by Sara Ramo.

_{Berta Cáccamo: QNJ(1993)}

The first of the three, QNJ, is an acrylic by Galicia-born Berta Cáccamo painted in the early 1990s, when she was spending time at the Spanish Academy in Rome. The Banco de España acquired the painting in 2020, two years after the early death of the artist. It depicts a protruding grey shape on a white background. Like other works by Cáccamo from that period, the shape has what Juan de Nieves describes as a "flowing, liquid appearance that imbues it with a sort of evanescent corporeality".  It is linked to her interest both in "observing nature and the contingent nature of its elements" and in "the seed of things which are still germinating".

_{Cristina García Rodero: Children's Circle(1995)}

Children's Circle is the second work highlighted. It is a photo taken by Cristina García Rodero in 1995 during her first trip to Georgia, shortly after the former Soviet Republic had emerged from a bloody civil war. It is perhaps one of the most hopeful of her series of photos from that trip, and it takes on some very special connotations in our current circumstances. She has returned to Georgia several times since, to chronicle the far-reaching changes that have taken place there over the years. The picture shows a group of small children crowding in surprise in the doorway of a school to look at the photographer. The artist is thus herself being watched, in a gesture filled with innocence but nonetheless capable of tugging at our heart-strings.

_{Sara Ramo: Contract II (2016)}

The most recent of the three works featured here is Contract II by Madrid-born Sara Ramo, a sculptural collage built up from cuttings from various issues of the Financial Times, which is considered to be the world's leading business daily. The work is a paradigmatic example of her art. Yolanda Romero writes that she intervenes in a critical fashion in objects linked to everyday life "reshaping them into strange, alien presences". Here, Ramo seeks to denounce the twisted, obscurantist logic of financial speculation that sparked the economic crisis of 2007. As the heir to a cultural tradition that has challenged the purely utilitarian, scientistic concept of today's world, she also evokes the iconographic potential of masks as a metaphor for the cryptic nature of contemporary financial instruments and the fetishistic, quasi-religious fervour in which they are often held in advanced capitalist societies.