Luis Bassat’s private collection is formed by contemporary art reflecting the passion and tastes of the advertising executive and his wife Carmen. Indeed, this passion has sometimes gone beyond the limits of collecting, like when a painting by Xavier Serra de Rivera caught Luis’s eye in the window of Barcelona’s Galeria Adrià in the autumn of 1973. He walked straight in and a few hours later, on returning home, he was the owner of the Serra de Rivera and of a substantial part of the gallery as well. The Luis Bassat Collection comprises about 1,500 original works and the period best represented in it is from the 1970s on. The artistic consolidation of the generation of Albert Ràfols-Casamada and Josep Guinovart coincided with the awakening of Luis’s enthusiasm for contemporary art collecting. In November of 2010, the Carmen and Luis Bassat Private Foundation signed an agreement to place the collection on loan to the Mataró Contemporary Art Museum Consortium for its display in the Nau Gaudí, the first building ever designed by the great architect Antoni Gaudí, 130 years ago. Now the home of the Bassat Collection, it was in this industrial structure for cotton bleaching in Mataró that Gaudí first applied the parabolic arch, a fundamental feature of his subsequent works.