BILBAO.- The trustees of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum Foundation approved the proposed donation of the Bergé Collection of international contemporary art, assembled over the last three decades by the firm Bergé y Compañía.

The arrival of this collection increases the presence of European, North American and Latin American art in the museum, providing a counterpoint of remarkable scope and rigour for contextualising the most recent artistic creations.

The Bergé Collection donation consists of ninety-four artworks made between the late 1980s and the early twenty-first century. A significant number of women artists are represented in the group, which also attests to the great diversity of artistic practices during this period: paintings, works on paper, sculptures, photographs, videos and installations.

Since its inception, the Bergé Collection focused on acquiring early pieces by up-and-coming artists. Today it boasts works by Spanish creators whose international careers have taken off in recent years, such as Susana Solano, Pepe Espaliú, Cristina Iglesias, Ibon Aranberri and Dora García, as well as foreign artists like Tim Rollings + KOS, Vik Muniz, Céline van Balen, David Shrigley, Nedko Solakov, Rosario López, João Pénalva and Moris.

The donation of this collection honours Bergé’s founding purpose: to introduce current generations to the complex, stimulating artistic narrative of what is happening in our world and bequeath it to future generations.

At the same time, the gift reinforces Bergé y Compañía’s long-standing connection, forged in the late 1800s, to the city of Bilbao and to Bizkaia and also ties in with the century-old history of the Fine Arts Museum. The timing could not be more perfect, as this year marks the centenary of the creation of Bilbao’s first contemporary art museum, the Museo de Arte Moderno, forerunner of the current Fine Arts Museum.

To introduce this latest addition to its holdings, from now until September the museum will exhibit six works in the same halls as the Sergio Prego installation Thirteen to Centaurus, a representative sampling of the Bergé Collection that illustrates its special interest in sculpture:

• Susana Solano. La caritat, n.º 3 (1986-1987)
• Cristina Iglesias. Sin título n.º 389 (1990)
• Jonathan Borofski. Counting (3, 326, 754-3, 326, 760) (1990)
• Vik Muniz. Richard Serra, Prop, 1968 (Picture of Dust) (2000)
• Ibon Aranberri. Ornate and rigid (galvanized) (2007)
• Diango Hernández. Sin título (2005)

These selected sculpture pieces are accompanied by one of the first works to enter the Bergé Collection—Double Speaker by American artist Richard Artschwager—which the museum recently acquired. Made in 1966 out of a novel industrial material called Formica, the work is an exceptional example of early minimalism.

The Bergé Collection

For Bergé y Cía., a family company founded by three Basque entrepreneurs in 1870, collecting international contemporary art has been an exemplary pursuit in a corporate ecosystem that ranges from the firm’s original port activities to wine culture, transport, the automotive industry and new technologies. The collection that has now entered the museum was started in the 1980s with a clear emphasis on contemporary art and the aim of bearing witness to the artistic scene and most pressing social issues of our time.

In 2008, the Bergé Collection received the ARCO Corporate Collecting Prize. In 2011 it was invited to join the non-profit IACCCA (International Association of Corporate Collections of Contemporary Art), whose members represent over fifty of the world’s most important collections assembled by corporate groups and organisations, and in 2014 it joined the association's board of directors. In 2015 it was included in Global Corporate Collections, a book featuring the eighty finest corporate collections in the world.

In recent years, Bergé has loaned works for exhibitions organised by prestigious cultural institutions and museums across the globe, including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Madrid Stock Exchange, Sala Alcalá 31 managed by the Regional Government of Madrid, Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Fundación Mapfre, Museo Picasso in Málaga, Fundació Joan Miró, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Museo Universidad de Navarra in Pamplona, Tate Modern and the Milton Keynes Gallery in London, Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian in Lisbon, Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro in Milan and the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh.