Art and culture
Marcel Jean
Surrealist Wardrobe, 1941
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris
© Marcel Jean
Photo: © París, Les Arts Décoratifs/Jean Tholance
FEB.06.2025 – MAY.11.2025, MAD
1924. Other Surrealisms
On 15 October 1924, André Breton published the ‘First Manifesto of Surrealism’. One hundred years later, 1924. Other Surrealisms analyzes the reception and influence in Spain of that text and the Surrealist movement as a whole. The exhibition highlights that, despite its peripheral location in relation to the centres of the European artistic avant-garde, Spain not only contributed to the movement with some of its most representative figures (Dalí, Buñuel, Domínguez…), but also with many important yet lesser-known artists. The exhibition also addresses how Surrealism was reinterpreted in various Latin American countries, as well as the contribution of women to the movement.
Sakiko Nomura
Naked Time_025
© Sakiko Nomura. Courtesy of Akio Nagasawa Gallery
FEB.06.2025 – MAY.11.2025, MAD
Sakiko Nomura
Tender is the night
Best known for her photographs of male nudes, which have represented a defiant break with some of the taboos and traditional stereotypes of Japanese culture, Sakiko Nomura (1967) is one of the most outstanding photographers of her generation. In this, her first major retrospective, the nudes, in which the erotic tension is wrapped in an atmosphere of tenderness and a certain mystery, coexist alongside various other images (animals, natural landscapes, empty streets and roads, forests, plants and flowers, fireworks…) to ultimately form a series of interrupted narratives that evoke cinematic fictions.
José Guerrero
Hwy-80 (House near Wendover), UT, 2011
De la serie «After the Rainbow»
Colecciones Fundación MAPFRE
© José Guerrero, VEGAP, Madrid, 2025
FEB.15.2025 – MAY.18.2025, BCN
José Guerrero
Concerning Landscape
The work of José Guerrero (Granada, 1979) unfolds as a continuous exercise in reflecting on the representation and perception of landscape and architecture through photographic imagery. His images, organised in series on places rich in iconographic and historical significance (La Mancha, Carrara, Sierra Nevada, the Thames…), transform the landscape into a living, dynamic entity, upon which the viewer’s cultural background and the photographer’s meaningful use of light, colour and atmosphere ultimately construct a poetic reading -laden with meanings and connotations- of the space.
This exhibition spans over 20 years of his career to date.
Felipe Romero Beltrán
Amigo de El Friki y pared rosa
Bravo
© Felipe Romero Beltrán
FEB.15.2025 – MAY.18.2025, BCN
Felipe Romero
Bravo
Bravo, by the Colombian Felipe Romero (1992), is the winning project of the second edition of the KBr Photo Award, launched by Fundación MAPFRE in 2021. Like many of his other works, Bravo offers a reflection on a scenario of tension and conflict: a stretch of the Rio Grande (known as the río Bravo in Mexico) that forms part of the more than one thousand kilometres of border between Mexico and the United States that coincide with its course. Through images of people, landscapes, and architecture, Bravo constructs a visual essay, sober and poetic, centred around the idea of waiting and border identity.
Louis Stettner
Woman Holding Newspaper, New York , 1946
Courtesy of the Louis Stettner Archive, Paris
© Louis Stettner Estate
Louis Stettner
– 08
Antiguo Instituto Jovellanos (Gijón, Asturias)
Poetry. Street photography. Lyrical humanism.
Louis Stettner (New York, 1922-Paris, 2016) trained at the New York Photo League school, where he studied under Sid Grossman and coincided with Weegee, who would become a great friend of his. In Paris he met Brassaï, who became his mentor. However, despite being fully immersed in the debate on historical photography for a good part of the last century, his work was not given the recognition it deserved at the time, perhaps because it did not adhere to a specific style.
Straddling New York and Paris, Stettner was rooted in two worlds at a time when most photographers could only relate to one. In this sense, his work contains aesthetic elements of both New York street photography, with its bustling subway scenes, and the lyrical humanism of the French tradition, with the mountainous landscapes of the Alpilles in France.
Carlos Pérez Siquier
Roquetas de Mar, 1973
© Carlos Pérez Siquier. VEGAP, 2024
Carlos Pérez Siquier. Fundación MAPFRE Collections
– 02
Fundación MAPFRE Canarias (La Laguna, Tenerife)
Modernity. Intuition. Originality.
Carlos Pérez Siquier (1930-2021), a leading figure in the forging of photographic modernism and the professionalizing of this medium in Spain, enjoyed a prominent place on the Spanish scene, firstly for his neorealism work and later as a pioneer of color photography.
If there is something that characterizes and makes the photography of Carlos Pérez Siquier so valuable and interesting, it is, on the one hand, the theme that runs through it from beginning to end–the author’s real and immediate world–and, on the other, the keen and unique gaze that the photographer poured into the images. This results in one of the most powerful and important bodies of work in Spanish photography from recent decades, which earned him the 2003 Spanish National Photography Prize.
Berenice Abbott
Peggy Guggenheim poses in her New York gallery Art of This Century, October 22, 1942
© 2025 Estate of Berenice Abbott
© AP Photo / Tom Fitzsimmons
31 Women. A Peggy Guggenheim exhibition
– 29
Museu de Artes Contemporânea – MAC (Lisboa, Portugal)
Talent. Opposition. Feminism.
In 1943, the collector Peggy Guggenheim organized one of the first exhibitions exclusively dedicated to the work of female artists in her New York gallery, Art of This Century. Entitled Exhibition by 31 Women, one of its aims was to highlight the contribution of women artists, who had often been relegated to the role of muses, imitators or companions of famous male artists due to the patriarchal mentality of the time.
The artists selected for 31 Women–including both established creators and emerging talents–came from Europe and the United States, and many of them were linked to surrealism and abstract art. Aware of the challenges they faced as women, these artists often swam against the tide, using the dominant artistic languages of their time: they reinterpreted the concepts of surrealism and abstract expressionism to reveal the patriarchal precepts on which these movements were based.
David Goldblatt
Lulu Gebashe and Solomon Mlutshana, who both worked in a record shop in the city, Mofolo Park, 1972
© The David Goldblatt Legacy Trust
David Goldblatt. No ulterior motive
– 22
Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT, USA)
Apparent calm. Privilege. Apartheid.
The prestigious South African photographer David Goldblatt (Randfontein, 1930 – Johannesburg, 2018) dedicated his life to documenting his country and its people. Known for his subtle portraits of life under apartheid, his work, which covers a wide range of subjects, is today indispensable for understanding what is undoubtedly one of the most painful processes and difficult periods in contemporary history.
The keys to the exhibition revolve around three themes: the representation of everyday life, “the quiet and the ordinary where nothing ‘happened’”, so that the viewer could draw their own conclusions; the greater freedom to document life in South Africa in the most honest and direct way possible on account of being white; and the need to document apartheid.
