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 The Monastery of Sta. Maria of the Caves is located on the fertile right border of the Guadalquivir river the city and in its exit in front of towards Itálica and the Aljarafe. In this place, thanks to the wealth of their mud and clays, settled numerous furnaces potters almohades, and was in one of them, according to is deduced at the present time, where in 1248 it appeared the image of a Virgin, denominated for that reason, the Virgin of the Caves. In order to venerate this image a first franciscana hermitage settles and on 1399 Gonzalo de Mena, Archbishop of the city of Seville, founds the Monastery of the Cartuja and equips with more land the Convent. |
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 In its four centuries and means of existence, the Cartuja has known moments great splendor and others of serious crisis. Its geographic situation, in the margin of the Guadalquivir river, has caused that the Monastery successively was whipped per annual floods. Along and history, the community cartuja, for its protection and enrichment, been has welcomed in the Sevillian patronazgos of families like the Mena, Shore and Veraguas. It was in this Cartuja where the rest of Cristóbal were deposited Columbus during thirty years, since the admiral were assiduous visitor of the Monastery, in whose hospedería prepared their second travels. Santa Maria of the Caves was also spiritual retirement of Felipe II and they frequented personal like Aryans Montano and Teresa de Jesus and all the Spanish kings of pass by Seville. In the artistic aspect the Monastery became rich with important collections of I move away Fernandez, Durero, Grazes Gazini and Aprile de Carona; Mountain dweller and Pulls; Murillo, Cano and Zurbarán; , Pedro Roldán, Duke Cornejo, etc. The Cartuja was, more than a stable monument, a city walled in continuous change. In 1810 during the Napoleonic invasion, the cartujos were expelled and the Monastery, invaded by the French, was transformed into quarter of the occupation. The monks fled to Portugal and returned in 1812, definitively to be expelled in 1836 during the period of the Confiscation of Mendizábal. In 1986 the Meeting of Andalusia began the works of restoration and rehabilitation that are, tried to recover for the present, essential ementos of all its monástico, military last complex. and manufacturing. In this new context, the Monumental Set of the Cartuja of Seville is believed in 1989, with the mission of tutelary the monument, transforming it at the same time into a cultural diffusion and research center. The works of rehabilitation carried out, in the occasion of the Universal Exhibition of 1992, have equipped the building with expositivas facilities that do not have parallel in the Independent Community Andalusian and suppose a new stage in the history of this monument. |
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The last referential point of this new museística functionality of the Monastery marks the Decreto195/1997 to it, of 29 of Julio, the Council of Culture, by which the Center Andalusian of Contemporary Art taking like seat the Monastery of the Cartuja, Integra and assumes the management of the personnel and the old collections of the Monumental Set of the Cartuja and Museum of Contemporary Art of Seville, and the new statutes of the Center like dependent independent Organism of the Council of Culture are approved. |
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 In this way, the Center Andalusian of Contemporary Art has become the museística institution of the Independent Community that develops to the trusteeship and increase of its collections and the promotion of the artistic creation, by means of the development of programs of activities in its seat of the Monastery of the Cartuja of Seville. Within the specific objectives of the institution, these programs of activities are directed to the study and promotion of the international contemporary artistic creation in his more varied expressions. Temporary exhibitions, seminaries, factories, concerts, encounter and other events, are the tools of communication to carry out east intention with a clear educative intention. The cultural supply of the Center is complemented with the visit to the own monument, container of an important artistic and archaeological patrimony, product of his expanded history. |
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Therefore it has been come to integrate bottoms with others until finding an outline common that it could articulate the collection. Before the material impossibility to include complete century XX, we decided in the first place to establish a date, 1957, like theoretical beginning of the collection. That year the Step was not only the one of the creation of the group, whose importance in the Spanish art is obvious, but also the one of the formation of the Equipment 57, whose epicenter was in a city Andalusian: Cordova. On the other hand the option has been taken to bet by the art Andalusian. As opposed to a generalist content, the Center assumes the task of gathering contemporary history of the art that has been done in these earth, spreading it, studying it and putting it in relation to other manifestations of other authors and other places. |
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Left and battered, the Monastery was acquired in 1839 by the English retailer Charles Pickman, whom a factory of stoneware and Chinese porcelain in 1841 would install in the convent. The adaptation of the Cartuja to the necessities of the factory was at a first moment respectful towards the building. Nevertheless, little by little, the demands of the manufacturing production finished with the use of all the monásticos rest without contemplation. To several chimneys and ten furnaces were constructed, five of which still they are still on, and that determined the future visual conception of the monument. The factory of stoneware and porcelain continued working with the Monastery until 1982. 
From its creation in 1989, the Center Andalusian of Contemporary Art began to form an art work collection, slowly, with the vocation to get to be a referring one in the Independent Community. Reform of statutes in 1997, by means of which it assumed the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Seville and all the bottoms of the Meeting of Andalusia which in they were guarded, enormously increased the bottoms of the Center accelerating this process.