BBVA made its art collection available to the public at coleccionbbva.com

One of the most important private collections in Spain

• The website www.coleccionbbva.com offers multimedia and documentary information on more than 400 painting, sculpture, decorative art and numismatic works.  The website’s catalog will be expanded to include all the most relevant pieces in the collection.

• Together with works by Van Dyck, Murillo, Goya or Sorolla, the collection includes pieces from contemporary artists like Miró, Saura, Tàpies, Barceló, Chillida, Oteiza or Cristina Iglesias.

• The website includes a selection of masterpieces and proposes itineraries to bring the collection to the public.

• The use of the gigapixel photographic technique allows very high resolution images to be offered, showing details of the works that are not visible to the naked eye.

18-9-2013 — /EuropaWire/ — Juan Ignacio Apoita, Human Resources and Services manager of BBVA, and Francisco Calvo Serraller, a professor at the Complutense University in Madrid, presented today www.coleccionbbva.com, the website set up by the Bank in order to make its collection of works of art available to the public. The website offers multimedia and documentary information on one of the most important private collections in Spain and enables visitors to navigate in an intuitive and simple way through five centuries of history: from Van Dyck, Murillo, Goya or Sorolla, to contemporary artists like Miró, Saura, Tàpies, Barceló, Chillida, Oteiza or Cristina Iglesias.

“BBVA has always paid special attention to art and culture as basic ways of generating and disseminating knowledge”, said Juan Ignacio Apoita, who added that this website is “one more example of our commitment to omni-channel banking, which enables us to offer high-value contents in all kinds of channels”.

Francisco Calvo Serraller, professor of Contemporary Art History at the Complutense University in Madrid, pointed out that “the Fine Arts collection of BBVA continues to be one of the most notable in our country and also internationally”.

Over the years, the main banks that make up this Group have created a major private art collection that has become one of the most important in Spain: over 3,000 relevant works in disciplines such as painting, sculpture, decorative arts and numismatics. “In addition, this is a collection of collections that somehow follows the pattern of financial modernization in our country”, said Calvo Serraller.

These masterpieces have been admired by hundreds of thousands of people through the exhibitions organized in Spain and in many Latin American countries. The Human Resources and Services manager of BBVA pointed out that “with this website we want to make our collection available to art lovers where and when they want”, generating virtual meeting places where the works on display are reinforced through supporting text and graphics. The website’s catalog, which so far includes over 400 works, will be expanded to include all the most relevant pieces in the collection.

The users of the new website will be able to reflect on, enjoy and access the BBVA Collection in a customized way thanks to an intuitive, simple and attractive tool that includes multimedia material and enables visual studies to be conducted. This is a website intended for both specialists and the general public, ready to be viewed on all kinds of devices, with a specific version for smartphones.

The careful editing of the text and images, the cross-cutting navigation –that enables works from the same artist, period or school to be related–, the extensive glossary of terms and the detailed studies of the most relevant pieces offer users the possibility of delving deeper into the collection. Masterpieces have also been selected and thematic itineraries are proposed to gain greater understanding of the most significant pieces.

From the multimedia point of view, one of the main attractions of this website is the use of the gigapixel photographic technique, which offers very high resolution images and shows details of the works that are not visible to the naked eye. The website also has videos and 360º displays of some of the most relevant sculptures included in the BBVA Collection.

A collection of collections
In painting and sculpture, the BBVA Collection enables visitors to navigate through more than five centuries of the history of Spain and Europe, with two main blocks: a set of Spanish, Flemish and Italian works from the 15th to 21st centuries and an extensive list of Spanish painters from the last decades of the 20th century, although there are also examples from other schools, such as the French one.

Together with masterpieces of painting and the graphic work by artists like Pieter Snayers, Anton van Dyck, Valentín de Boulogne, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Juan Carreño de Miranda, Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, Francisco de Goya, Ignacio Zuloaga or Joaquín Sorolla, visitors will also find pieces by contemporary artists, including Joan Miró, Antonio Saura, Antoni Tàpies, Juan Manuel Díaz-Caneja, Esteban Vicente or Miquel Barceló, as well as sculptures by Eduardo Chillida, Jorge de Oteiza, Andreu Alfaro, Martín Chirino or Cristina Iglesias.

Worth mentioning in the Decorative Arts section is the quality of the tapestries, some of them Flemish and English; the collection of French and English-style timepieces, built by the great European clockmakers of the 18th and 19th centuries; a selection of vases from the Royal Factory of Sèvres (18th century), as well as an English globe and an Indian music stand, to mention just a few of the most relevant works.

BBVA’s numismatics collection consists of a good selection of bills and not only highlights the importance of each piece, but also offers an overview from the late 19th century and first decades of the 20th century, basically, including the bills issued from the 1930s to the 1990s. The coin collection, which is currently being cataloged, is also worth mentioning. It includes examples from the ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary periods, providing a very comprehensive overview.

Contact details:

Corporate Communications

Tel. +91 374 67 97 / +91 374 54 05

julian.hdez@bbva.com / bsanjuanbenito@bbva.com

For more financial information about BBVA visit:

http://shareholdersandinvestors.bbva.com

For more BBVA news visit: http://press.bbva.com/

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