A gallery converted from a former school and bank in the heart of Bishop Auckland in County Durham, England, is billed as the UK’s first museum dedicated to the art, history and culture of Spain. The museum which opened on 15 October is also the latest milestone in the bold Auckland Project, using culture to revive the fortunes of a small northern town left in tatters by the death of the coal mining industry.
The Spanish Gallery’s inaugural exhibition, designed by the Edinburgh-based Studio MB and created with Durham University’s Zurbarán Centre for Spanish and Latin American Art and Culture, will embody works by Spanish Golden Age painters and a space dedicated to an imposing old master crucifixion noninheritable with support from Art Fund. Alternative galleries explore the enduring Spanish theme of death and also the fruitful fusion of Spanish and Islamic art, with facsimile objects and interiors created when 3D scans by the Madrid-based Factum Foundation.
Several items are from the non-public assortment of dessert apple Ruffer, the financier who is that the main backer of the £150m metropolis Project. Extra loans are planned from Museo Del Prado, the Hispanic Society of America, and alternative major collections of Spanish art. Ruffer is leading the steward team, the primary time he has to contend such a role, and says he’s not an instructional however a storyteller. He argues that the gallery cannot fail on its terms: “Most folks within the sector have to be compelled to pay way an excessive amount of time worrying concerning who can come. Being made permits you to see things in another way. We’ve got a set here that’s terribly authentic, full of truths, terribly powerful—and we’ve got the advantage of not giving stuff concerning who comes.” However, this can be not the complete story. Ruffer has long been gripped by the ability and religious intensity of Spanish art. once the Church Commissioners, who manage the Church of England’s assets, planned in 2012 to sell twelve monumental Zurbaráns that had remained the walls of the bishops’ palace since 1756, Ruffer paid £15m to stay them together. He then bought the for the most part derelict palace to preserve their home, and since then the project has matured remorselessly. The new gallery can show the sole painting separated from the palace set since the eighteenth century, on loan from the Grimsthorpe and Drummond Castle Trust.
“It’s all concerning regeneration,” Ruffer insists. “It all has got to serve what I’m interested in, the city finding out once more as a thriving place.”