In this article: From Darkness to Balance
The Museo de Arte Abstracto Español in Cuenca
Leaving the Fundación Antonio Pérez, still marked by the gravity of Antonio Saura’s work, we crossed only a few streets—but entered a different mental climate altogether.
Our next destination was the Museo de Arte Abstracto Español, housed in the iconic Casas Colgadas, suspended above the Huécar gorge.
Few museum transitions are as immediate and meaningful as this one. Where Saura confronts, this museum listens. Where darkness dominates, colour, rhythm, and balance take over.
Architecture as a Threshold
Approaching the Casas Colgadas from the outside already sets the tone.
The historic wooden balconies cling to the rock face, opening outward into space. Inside, light filters softly through carefully positioned windows. From several rooms, the view opens onto the wide valley below—rock, air, distance.
These vistas are not incidental. They are part of the museum’s rhythm: looking at abstraction, then looking outward; returning from colour and line to landscape and horizon.
Architecture and art enter into a quiet, almost meditative dialogue.
Fernando Zóbel and the Art of Restraint
The museum was founded in 1966 by Fernando Zóbel, whose vision remains palpable throughout the collection. Zóbel did not aim to overwhelm. Instead, he sought concentration, clarity, and attentiveness.
His own works—subtle, layered, rhythmical—set the tone. Colour appears not as gesture but as modulation; structure emerges without rigidity. After the emotional density of Saura, Zóbel’s paintings feel like a recalibration of perception.
Not a negation of intensity, but a re-balancing.
Post-War Abstraction in Harmony
The collection focuses on Spanish abstract painting and sculpture of the 1950s to 1970s, bringing together key figures such as Eduardo Chillida, Antoni Tàpies, Antonio Saura, Gustavo Torner, Lucio Muñoz, José María Yturralde, and Francisco Farreras.
Even where Saura appears again, his works are embedded in a broader visual conversation. Here, they feel less abyssal—held in check by neighbouring works, by space, by light.
The curatorial approach is remarkably restrained. No explanatory overload, no theatrical gestures. Works are given room to breathe, to resonate quietly with one another.
Colour After Darkness
Seen directly after the Pérez collection, this museum unfolds like a gentle counter-movement.
Colour returns—not exuberant, but composed. Structure replaces rupture. Tension remains, yet it is distributed, shared across surface and space.
This is not consolation. It is equilibrium.
Standing before these works, with the Huécar valley opening beyond the windows, abstraction feels less like withdrawal from the world than a refined way of remaining within it.
Conclusion
Together, the two museums form one of the most compelling artistic constellations in Spain.
The Fundación Antonio Pérez confronts.
The Museo de Arte Abstracto Español harmonises.
To walk from one to the other is to experience abstraction not as a style, but as a spectrum of human response—between darkness and balance, rupture and form, intensity and quiet presence.
Cuenca offers few museums.
But it offers them at exactly the right distance from one another.
