One day in January 2022, the Spanish-German art collector Helga de Alvear appeared, at the age of 86, in the town of Hervás, north of Cáceres. She had learned that a local museum, the Peréz Comendador-Leroux, kept a treasure trove of twentieth-century Spanish art. César Velasco, director of the center, took it upon himself to show it to him. “Since we didn’t have an elevator to go up to the stores, I put two chairs facing each other on the floor below,” Velasco tells ICON Design. “One for Helga to sit on, and another to place the works, which I myself took down one by one.” There were 23 pieces that made up the deposit that in the year 2000 the artist from Extremadura, resident in Switzerland, Ángel Duarte (Cáceres, 1930-2007), made in the museum, a set of paintings and sculptures of which he was the author.
De Alvear did not hide his enthusiasm. “Amazed like a child,” defines Velasco. He had been trying for some time to promote the purchase of the complex by public administrations to ensure that this fragment of Extremadura’s artistic heritage would remain within the region, but the process did not end up coming to fruition. With the private collector things took another speed: she made a second visit a few days later, this time accompanied by José María Viñuela, curator and curator of the Helga de Alvear Collection (who died last June), who began the conversations for the acquisition . In February the agreement was closed by which De Alvear bought the set from the three daughters of the artist. “Her daughters live in Switzerland and they preferred to sell their work,” explains Helga de Alvear. “So I bought everything at a very good price.”
The collector’s intention is to respect Duarte’s wish and keep the deposit in Hervás. Although, until next February 12, 2023, 15 of the pieces can be seen at the Helga de Alvear Museum of Contemporary Art in Cáceres (which exhibits part of its collection, with works ranging from Goya to Ai Wei Wei), integrated into the sample Angel Duarte. Mathematics and social transformation, which claims and brings new light to the figure of a pioneering Spanish artist, and not as well known in our country as he deserves. “Now that the museum has a lot of his works, we have been able to organize this exhibition”, concludes De Alvear.
Ángel Duarte came from a working family in rural Cáceres who, when he was a child, moved to Madrid. There, his father worked for the National Telegraph Company. During the Civil War he lost his mother and his three-month-old sister. He worked from a very young age in his uncle’s goldsmith’s workshop, which was very useful training for his future artistic practice. In return, he did not obtain a consistent academic education, although he studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Madrid’s calle Palma, and attended courses at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, where he met the Basque artist Agustín Ibarrola.
Emigrated to Paris in 1954, he would create the artistic collective Equipo 57 there three years later, whose members also included, at one time or another, Ibarrola, Juan Cuenca, José Duarte and Néstor Basterretxea, among others. “For me, Ángel Duarte is Team 57″, says Helga de Alvear. Picking up influences from Russian Constructivism and Neoplasticism, and from more recent artists such as Serge Poliakoff or Jorge Oteiza, the group assumed an abstract formal language combined with a desire for social transformation.
The gallery owner Denise René, supporter of great names in geometric abstraction of the moment such as Vasarely or Carlos Cruz-Díez, noticed them and began to represent them. But from 1962 the group stopped collaborating (Ibarrola was imprisoned by the Franco regime for political reasons, and other members left Paris), and in 1966 it was officially dissolved. By then, Duarte was already living in Sion, Switzerland, where he developed a solo practice that continued the line of abstraction undertaken by Equipo 57. There he also founded another collective, Group Y, together with the Swiss Walter Fischer and Robert Tanner. He was part of the European kinetic art movement and also developed numerous art projects in the public space, mostly in Switzerland, where he always maintained his residence.
![Room of the Peréz Comendador-Leroux museum, in Cáceres, where the work of Ángel Duarte is exhibited.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/Ta6cdyFUKydDLdQzmI8_XMQoByU=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/VRY4QN235NDBDKDWJQCQREHANM.jpg)
The exhibition at the Cáceres museum makes it easier to understand why Duarte’s work interested Helga de Alvear, whose collection – some 3,000 pieces, which she donates in batches to the Junta de Extremadura – reserves a wide space for geometric abstraction, kinetic art and minimalism. The first room of the exhibition is reserved for various works signed by Equipo 57 (also belonging to the De Alvear collection), some gouaches and oil paintings where Duarte’s seal can already be appreciated. The sculptures that Duarte made in stainless steel with silver welding – he used a computer in his design, but the production was completely handmade – possess, in addition to being exquisitely crafted, a hypnotic quality. They seem to configure themselves before the eyes of the spectator in a different way from each angle that they are contemplated. The effect of movement is obtained thanks to overlapping patterns that, in screen prints on glass and transparent methacrylate, are projected onto other surfaces thanks to the play of light and shadow.
Also noteworthy are the models for monumental works in public spaces, many of them on loan from a private collection (along with a film owned by the CAAC museum in Seville, they are the only pieces on display in the museum that do not belong to Helga de Alvear). But, due to the way in which she concentrates the artistic principles of her author, a metal and plaster sculpture stands out, Cube [División de un cubo por 6 paraboloides hiperbólicos]which Helga de Alvear had already acquired in 2018 from the José de la Mano gallery in Madrid, whose exhibition that year, Angel Duarte. The international voice of Equipo 57claimed the artist as a great figure of recent Spanish art unfairly forgotten.
![Detail of one of the works of Ángel Duarte](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/Ao-f-EnprxUtniBcyEsafwNlc88=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/J2XGNL3ELNHJLKJAJCK26TRMWE.jpg)
Despite lacking scientific training, Duarte was one of the first artists to use computers for the design of his pieces, and he maintained a solid interest in mathematics, particularly the figure of the hyperbolic paraboloid – known as the “silla de mount”–, which often formed the modules from which, by addition and rotation, he built his sculptures. María Jesús Ávila, coordinator of the Helga de Alvear Museum and curator of the exhibition, recalls that this form has been frequently used in architecture, and cites cases such as the Phillips Pavilion by Le Corbusier for the 1958 Brussels International Exposition or the Güell House. of Gaudi. “It is very versatile for making vaulted concrete roofs,” she explains. “But in the case of Duarte, there was also a flight from the subjective and the personal, the search for something absolutely objective that he found in mathematics and the paraboloid.”
In his time, abstraction –especially abstract expressionism originating in New York with authors such as Pollock or De Kooning– was perceived as a subjective and individualistic form of expression. However, Duarte had a social and democratizing vision of art that involved diluting individual authorship (hence his participation in artistic collectives), staying out of the market (Grupo Y refused to commercialize his works) and using universal forms. of geometry. “After Equipo 57, Agustín Ibarrola or José Duarte turned towards figuration, with a social sense”, points out Ávila. “Ángel Duarte also had that social sense, but from mathematics and abstraction. Somehow, he took up a very Bauhaus ideology, of making art for everyone, which was also in Equipo 57″.
![Detail of one of the works of Ángel Duarte](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/UkupuY7Ae70It7tK7An9qcrZxj4=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/IPQ6SY7HRRGM5FEF25LB234FTM.jpg)
Better known in Switzerland than in Spain, after the end of the Franco dictatorship he began to travel more frequently to our country, where he received some awards and tributes. Later he made the decision that a substantial part of his work would be exhibited to the public in the province of Cáceres. And the place chosen to make the deposit of 23 pieces was the Peréz Comendador-Leroux Museum, in Hervás, about 6 kilometers from Aldeanueva del Camino, his hometown. In addition to geographical proximity, other motivations of a more symbolic nature cannot be ruled out in this gesture. This museum was created from a donation of work by the couple formed by another sculptor from Extremadura, Enrique Pérez Comendador (born in Hervás), and the also artist Madeleine Leroux. Pérez Comendador was an academic and figurative author, close to the Franco regime, and among his achievements and projects, in addition to monuments dedicated to conquerors and heroic deeds according to nationalist historiography, an equestrian statue of Franco stands out.
![Detail of one of the works of Ángel Duarte](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/7rQxqDa4lfRuK_Az02dPotOkHyI=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/PZ3BICYWV5HBRH7T3DLA6EE464.jpg)
In February, after the exhibition at the Helga de Alvear Museum, the works will return to Hervás to resume storage, as Duarte had wished. Keeping his works permanently there, radically abstract and derived from concerns of a social nature, constitutes a form of political gesture. Like the pieces of him, everything fits together.
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