Leandro Navarro Art Gallery presents a selection of artworks that were part of Ernesto Wuthenow's art collection. This German businessman and collector, born in Leipzig in 1904, was a relevant figure in the cultural Spanish scene of the 1960s and one of the founding partners of the legendary Spanish art gallery Juana Mordó.

Around 1935, Wuthenow began to visit Spain, where he settled after the II World War and founded the firm Iberopiel. As painter Antonio López García recalls in the catalog that we have prepared for the exhibition, Wuthenow developed a great friendship with him and with Spanish realist painters such as Francisco López, Isabel Quintanilla, and María Moreno. He also established relations with others such as Antonio Saura, Enrique Gran, Luis Sáez, Eduardo Chillida, Lucio Muñoz, and Amalia Avia.

In Germany, he acted as an ambassador of the Spanish painters represented by Juana Mordó Gallery and organized for them several projects in important galleries. For instance, he prepared the group show Spanische Realisten [Spanish Realists] at Hans Brocktedt Gallery in Hamburg in 1977, in which Antonio López García, María Moreno, Francisco López e Isabel Quintanilla participated.

He also became a partner of Hanna Bekker vom Rath (the founder of the Frankfurter Kunstkabinett) who, in the words of Ernesto’s grandson Frank Harders-Wuthenow, was “a figure in the German artistic scene after the War as important as Juana Mordó was in Spain.” Harders-Wuthenow also recalls how his grandfather decided to give back the artworks of his collection to the artists, considering that he had not paid enough for them. The artists knew about this nice gesture after the collector’s death and decided to take one artwork each. In the current exhibition, you can see the ones recovered by Isabel Quintanilla (Habitación de costura, 1974). Ernesto Wuthenow’s family also donated some artworks to the Hamburger Kunsthalle and kept others that can be enjoyed in this exhibition.

Exhibition catalog: https://leandro-navarro.com/catalogo_online/coleccion_wuthenow/catalogo_coleccion_wuthenow.pdf

Video: https://youtu.be/cYSC85mNEeE