George Baselitz will be one of the main players this year at Museo Würth La Rioja
George Baselitz will be one of the main players this year at Museo Würth La Rioja
Museo Würth La Rioja opened to the public on September 7, 2007 at the main logistics facility of the company Würth España S.A., located in Agoncillo, La Rioja. Since then, the museum has implemented the Würth Group’s international philosophy of art and culture as a social component, focused on promoting access to culture with special attention to the plastic arts. The museum has a total exhibition area of 3,100 m2 and a sculpture garden measuring 11,280 m2 where works from the Würth Collection are displayed. This is one of the most important private collections of contemporary art in Europe. The Würth Collection’s holdings currently comprise more than 20,000 pieces by some of the most fundamental creators of the history of art during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as Pablo Picasso, Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor, Henry Moore, Edvard Munch, Eduardo Chillida, Andy Warhol, Anselm Kiefer, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and Joan Miró. In addition, the collection includes an “Old Masters” section, which brings together fundamental pieces of Central European medieval painting by artists such as Hans Holbein the Younger and Lucas Cranach the Elder.
The philosophy of the collection is to combine spaces dedicated to culture and work, which is why the Würth Museum Network places its museums in industrial areas. Currently, the collection has 15 spaces for art and culture in Europe that are active in terms of cultural and exhibition programming. In addition, the collection’s holdings are regularly lent to museums and shows around the world, sometimes on a permanent basis – such as the Walk of Modern Art in Salzburg, Austria.
Last year, Museo Würth La Rioja inaugurated the exhibition “Animality: Animal Images in the Würth Collection,” which was open to the public until February 18, 2024. The exhibition explored how art depicts the different meanings behind animality through 150 pieces dating from 1875 to 2020 by 85 collection artists, including some of the most significant creators of recent decades such as Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, André Masson, Barry Flanagan, Xenia Hausner, Fernando Botero, Dieter Roth, and Georg Baselitz. It was precisely the latter artist, Georg Baselitz, who took over in the exhibition space in mid-March 2024. Baselitz was one of the essential artists of the revival of European painting in the 1970s; he was a player in the recovery of the gesture and subjectivity which characterized the Neo-Expressionism of the German “New Savages.” Until the beginning of 2025, Museo Würth La Rioja will have on display a selection of approximately 50 pieces –all belonging to the Würth Collection– featuring different dimensions, moments, and disciplines to illustrate Baselitz’s artistic career.
Museo Würth La Rioja is also the home to the Würth Spain Collection, which features pieces by the most significant artists of the second half of the twentieth century (Miquel Barceló, Manolo Valdés, Richard Deacon, Miquel Navarro, and Jaume Plensa) and by noteworthy creators such as Tony Bevan, José Manuel Ballester, Tony Oursler, David Rodríguez Caballero, Xavier Mascaró, and Blanca Muñoz. The spectacular large head by Manolo Valdés (“Lillie”), an identifying piece of the museum, has presided over the main atrium of the building since its inauguration and is permanently displayed along with other pieces from the collection, including some site-specific works by Miquel Navarro, Richard Deacon, and Darío Urzay.
Museo Würth La Rioja
Avda. Cameros, Plots 86-89, Agoncillo.
