By IANS,
Mexico City: Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world according to Forbes magazine, is setting up an art museum in Mexico City that will exhibit around 66,000 works, including a few by noted artists Picasso, Rodin and Dali.
Construction of the museum, designed by his son-in-law, Mexican architect Fernando Romero, started in 2008 and it will be inaugurated this April, its curator Alfonso Miranda said.
The structure’s facade will be covered with 16,000 hexagonal mirrors of varying sizes and it will have an exhibition space of 6,000 sq m distributed on six floors.
Among the masterpieces chosen for display are works by Picasso, Rodin, Dali and Mexican artists Diego Rivera, Clemente Orozco and Rufino Tamayo.
Works by European masters El Greco, Rubens and Tintoretto and painters of the Spanish colonial baroque school such as Jose Juarez and Miguel Herrera will also be on show.
The public would also get to see a collection of 2,000 gold coins of the Viceroyalty of New Spain and 1,000 silver coins from the Second Mexican Empire.
Other works never before shown to the public will be vessels from Mesoamerica, created by cultures in the Mexican states of Nayarit, Jalisco, Colima and Guanajuato.