The Fundació Per Amor a l’Art (FPAA) is plesead to present Sandra Guimarães, as the new artistic director of Bombas Gens art centre (València, Spain).
Sandra Guimarães has the endorsement of the director of the Art Area of FPAA, Vicent Todolí, who has followed her solid career from the beginning and worked with her in several projects.
In her first public appearance, Sandra Guimarães shared her motivation to lead the Valencian art centre: “It is an immense privilege for me to accept this position. Bombas Gens has been one of the great successes of recent years in Spain and abroad. I thank José Luis Soler and Susana Lloret (the founders) for their vision, their determination to serve art and artists, and to honor the direct experience of their work. The collection that has been created with the advice of Vicent Todolí is very stimulating and it denotes a high degree of demand. And the remarkable program developed untill now is quite a challenge. I look forward to work with the purpose of taking the institution into the next chapter of its history.”
Guimarães takes charge of Bombas Gens at a time when, in her view, “museums should act and show why they are necessary more than ever”. In this sense, she has stated that she is looking forward to work with the team of the Valencian art center to continue making this effort, enabling the execution of ambitious projects, providing transformative experiences in order to have a museum that is inclusive, artist-centered, active and that develops research at various levels.
Sandra Guimarães’s (Porto) career in the visual arts spans around 20 years, and includes positions as Curator at Serralves Museum (Porto, Portugal) 1998-2010, as well as, founding Director of Programs & Chief Curator at Remai Modern (Saskatoon, Canada) 2015-2019. In 2018, she was a member of the ScotiaBank nominators for the Award Photography Prize 2018, in Toronto, Canada.
She has worked and developped projects recently with artists, such as, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ryan Gander, Rosa Barba, Haegue Yang, Rikrit Tiravanija, Joan Jonas, Daniel Steegman Mangrané, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Ahlam Shibli, Matt Mullican, Cristina Iglesias, Stan Douglas, and Jimmie Durham, amongst others.
Bombas Gens is an art center located in an old factory built between 1930 and 1935 according to the characteristic geometric Art Déco style of this period, it preserves a medieval cellar and a Civil War anti-aircraft shelter, both open to visits. This building is considered an exceptional gem of Valencian industrial heritage with 6.200 m2 hosting in its warehouses the privately owned collection Per Amor a l’Art. This collection puts together a wide selection of unique works by national and international artists, with a special focus on photography and abstract languages in both painting and sculpture. Continuously growing, this collection is compound of more than 1,500 artworks by about 150 authors. Bombas Gens Art Center also holds a program of exhibitions and cultural activities and an educational project in order to make art accesible to the people becoming an asset of cultural interest. It is promoted by the Fundació Per Amor a l’Art.
