The Cultural District of L'Hospitalet de Llobregat is in vogue. For a few days now, it has been rumored as the location Rosalía has chosen to set up her music studio, an artist's commitment to the city that is not surprising, since for years it is where she has located the headquarters of her company Motomami, near Plaza Europa. With that buzz in the background, the La Caixa Foundation announced this Thursday the opening of a pioneering cultural center throughout the country where it will concentrate its contemporary art collection, the first private one in Spain and the main one in Europe.
The new ArtsStudio CaixaForum, which will have an area of 10,000 square meters, will bring together the more than 1,000 works that the foundation has been acquiring for forty years. Almost 500 artists are part of the collection, with names such as Antoni Tàpies, Ignasi Aballí, Soledad Sevilla, Juan Muñoz, Cristina Iglesias, Tacita Dean, Bruce Nauman, Gerhardt Richter, Sigmar Polke, Doris Salcedo, Mona Hatoum, Cindy Sherman and Pierre Huyghe. In addition to becoming a national reference center for the research and conservation of works of art, the center is intended to function as a meeting place for art, culture and thought professionals at national and international levels. It is expected to open to artist visits and professional seminars on heritage conservation.
The deposit of works from the La Caixa foundation's collection has been distributed between CaixaForum Barcelona and a warehouse in L'Hospitalet for two decades, but both spaces have ended up reaching their capacity limit. It was then that the entity considered concentrating all the work, as well as the conservation workshop and laboratory, in a single place, which will also free up space in the Montjuïc cultural center. "With this project we want to give even more value to this unique heritage and continue working on the connection with the most vibrant reality of the art of our days and on the ability to create associations and establish links between art and the world around us," values the president of the foundation, Isidre Fainé.
The cultural center will be set up in the building that the foundation used until now as a warehouse, located between Leonardo da Vinci street and Avenida del Carrilet, near concert halls such as Salamandra and El Pumarejo and various artists' workshops. "L'Hospitalet is a culturally very vibrant city. Since the Cultural District was launched, one of its objectives as a strategic city project has been to promote collaboration between artistic and cultural agents and other entities and institutions. Now, with the arrival of ArtStudio CaixaForum, a unique and singular heritage is brought closer to our artists and creatives, and a district that has never stopped growing is strengthened," defends its mayor, Núria Marín.
The La Caixa foundation will invest 12 million euros in reforming and expanding the L'Hospitalet building. The rehabilitation is expected to begin in mid-2024 and be operational in 2026. The works will allow for the expansion of a basement and a side plot, and the creation of two vehicle accesses and two accesses for the center's staff, as well as the implementation of an office space. ArtStudio CaixaForum will be composed of spaces for the conservation, study, management, and storage of works that require strict climate conditions for their conservation as well as those that do not.