Velázquez’s Santa Rufina and Immaculate Conception return to the Focus-Abengoa Foundation

August 4, 2015

• Almost 800,000 visitors in Vienna and Paris have admired the paintings on the occasion of the major exhibition on Velázquez.

Seville, August 4th, 2015- The Focus-Abengoa Foundation announced today that Velázquez’s Santa Rufina and Immaculate Conception paintings are now back at their headquarters at the Hospital de los Venerables, after participating in the major international exhibition on Velázquez that took place in Vienna and Paris since last fall.

The Focus-Abengoa Foundation collaborated through a temporary loan of Velázquez’s works Santa Rufina and the Inmmaculate to the prestigious exhibitions that during the fall of 2014 and spring of 2015 were devoted to the artist in the Kunts Historisches Museum in Vienna, the largest retrospective ever organized in Central Europe, and that has subsequently been shown at the Grand Palais in Paris organized by the Louvre. The exhibition, which received more than 800,000 visitors in the two cities, has gained international recognition of the scientific community for the huge effort made to make the genius of this universal artist known to its fullest.

The city of Seville was represented by the Focus-Abengoa Foundation with two of his major works that coexisted with such important paintings as The Forge of Vulcan, from the Prado Museum; The Rokeby Venus from the National Gallery in London; or The Water Seller of Seville, from the Wellington Collection Apsley House in London.

The Foundation created in 2008 the permanent collection of the Centro Velázquez, now converted into a model space for recovery of the city’s lost heritage. The acquisition of Velázquez’s Santa Rufina painting by Focus-Abengoa began a commitment to heritage recovery and represented a qualitative leap that gave rise to the Diego Velázquez Research Center, considered as an international benchmark of painting and sculpture from the first third of Naturalism in Seville.

The Focus-Abengoa Foundation

The Focus-Abengoa Foundation was created in 1982 as a result of the cultural work begun in 1972 by Abengoa with the publication of the works Temas Sevillanos (Themes of Seville) and Iconografía de Sevilla (Iconography of Seville). A collection of documents, books and engravings on the Kingdom of Seville and by Sevillian authors was created during the same period. This initial cultural work showed Abengoa’s directors the importance of the company’s involvement in activities that directly benefit society, beyond the firm’s core technology work, which led to the creation of the Seville Cultural Fund Foundation. The Hospital de los Venerables, a 17th century monument and the headquarters of the Focus-Abengoa Foundation in Seville, has housed the Diego Velázquez Research Centre, a leading institution for studying and disseminating the Baroque era and the Sevillian period of this universally renowned artist, since the acquisition of Velázquez’s “Santa Rufina” by the Foundation in 2007. The focus on this crucial era of the Golden Age is complemented with the legacy from Professor Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, bequeathed to the Foundation in 2011. It comprises his library, photo library, personal archive and art collection and is being catalogued to help create a library specialising in the art and culture of the Baroque period. http://focus.abengoa.es/

For more information:

Communication Department of Abengoa

Patricia Malo de Molina

Tel: +34 954 93 71 11

Email: communication@abengoa.com

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