From September 20, 2024 to January 12, 2025, CentroCentro, a space of the Area of Culture, Tourism and Sports of the Madrid City Council, located in the Palacio de Cibeles, hosts the exhibition “Seventy great masters of the Pérez Simón Collection”, which brings together some of the most valuable pieces of this remarkable collection, most of them never before seen in Madrid, and which represents a true journey through the History of Art.

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Among the Masters that are part of the selection we find: Lucas Cranach the Elder, Bronzino, Rubens, el Greco, Murillo, Anton Van Dyck, Canaletto, Tiepolo, Goya, Turner, Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Pissarro, Gauguin, Sisley, Monet, Renoir, Joaquín Sorolla, Ignacio de Zuloaga, Eduard Munch, Frida Kahlo, Tamara de Lempicka, Fernand Léger, Rothko, René Magritte, Alex Katz, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí.

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​The Pérez Simón Collection is made up of more than 4,000 pieces of painting, sculpture, drawing, decorative arts and manuscripts, and is today considered one of the most important private collections in the world. It is completed with a library of more than 50,000 volumes, with a documentary collection that supports the Collection itself.

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The businessman and collector Juan Antonio Pérez Simón was born in Asturias in 1941, from where he emigrated to Mexico with his parents at the age of 5. The germ of his Collection dates back to 1964 when, as he himself recalls, he made a trip to Europe “that defined my intense and indissoluble bond with the plastic arts and gave me the norm for their enjoyment”.

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During this trip, Juan Antonio Pérez Simón dedicated his time and a large part of his budget, barely $8 a day, to visit all the museums that housed the works of art he most admired. As he himself explains: “Since my youth I was attracted by beauty, by works of art. Since I could not buy them, I hung reproductions of the paintings in my bedroom. In this way I satisfied my desire to enjoy the way in which each artist captured on his canvas the sublime, the poetic, the beautiful, even the terrible”.

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Since then, Juan Antonio Pérez Simón has not ceased in his search for beauty and has developed his collecting drive until he has put together, as a result of his efforts over the years, a Collection that is unique in the world.

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The selection of works in “Seventy Great Masters from the Pérez Simón Collection” has been made by the curators Graciela Téllez Trevilla, Susana Martínez-Garrido and Roberto Fernández Castro, who have articulated the selection in such a way as to offer a tour divided into 3 thematic sections, which are detailed below.