Art and culture
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Exhibitions
Paolo Gasparini
Electoral Campaign, avenida Urdaneta, Caracas, 1968
Fundación MAPFRE Collections
© Paolo Gasparini
JUN.01.2022 – AUG.28.2022, MAD
Paolo Gasparini
Field of Images
Paolo Gasparini. Field of images presents a complete overview of the long career of this italian-venezuelan photographer (1934). A passionate testimony of social and cultural tensions and changes in Latin America over the last six decades. Along with the extensive anthology of his photographs, the exhibition also offers a careful selection of his photobooks, a means of expression to which Gasparini has always attached special relevance.
Carlos Pérez Siquier
Marbella, 1974
© Pérez Siquier, VEGAP, Madrid, 2022
JUN.01.2022 – AUG.28.2022, MAD
Pérez Siquier
Carlos Pérez Siquier (Almería, 1930-2021) was a leading figure in the forging of photographic modernism and the overall professionalisation of photography in Spain. He enjoyed a prominent place on the Spanish scene, firstly for his Neo-realist work and later on as a pioneer of color photography. Pérez Siquier acted from a peripheral position on the sidelines in both of these disciplines, with a unique perspective fully mindful of his own authorship despite having started out with an intuitive understanding of photography that had more to do with that of a passerby than of a portraitist.
Bleda y Rosa
Mercado [Market]. Door of the Miletus market. Pergamon Museum, Berlin, 2021. Series Tipologies
© Bleda y Rosa, VEGAP, Barcelona, 2022
MAY.26.2022 – SEP.04.2022, BCN
Bleda y Rosa
The artistic career of María Bleda and José María Rosa can be seen as one of the most notable within contemporary Spanish photography. Over the course of three decades they have engaged in a unique, authorial practice centring on a consideration of the connections between image, place and memory. The exhibition Bleda y Rosa now being shown at the KBr Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona is the most extensive retrospective organised to date.
Lee Friedlander
Cincinnati, 1963
Fundación MAPFRE Collections
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York
Miguel Ángel Tornero
Untitled (the random series -romananzo-), 2013
© Miguel Ángel Tornero, VEGAP 2022
MAY.26.2022 – SEP.04.2022, BCN
Resonances
Fundación MAPFRE Collections
Resonancias-Colección Fundación MAPFRE [Resonances-Fundación MAPFRE Collection] is articulated as a sort of experimental manifesto. Its objective is to select a series of photographs from Fundación MAPFRE’s collection—which is particularly rich in classic North American authors—and seek out their reverberation in contemporary photographic practices. Thus, the project is not limited to choosing a number of works under certain curatorial criteria, but instead entails pedagogically speculating on the transition from photography to post-photography.
Art collections
Travelling exhibitions
Lee Friedlander
New York City, 1963
© Lee Friedlander, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco and Luhring Augustine, New York
Lee Friedlander
–
Everyday life. Critique. Social landscape.
Lee Friedlander is one of the most influential photographers of our time. Reconstructing his heterogeneous work means immersing ourselves in a world laden with everyday, recognizable elements that, on closer inspection, take on a different, more complete meaning.
Considered one of the key artists of the twentieth century, and after more than sixty years of taking photographs on a daily basis, he continues to renovate his language. In this search for visual metaphors that are difficult to understand, despite their apparent ordinariness, his critical gaze reflects, albeit with strictly formal intent, the enormity and chaos of American society.
The exhibition offers a journey through his extensive body of work, a portfolio that is almost always grouped in series, sets of photographs developed over several years. The works on display include photographs belonging to the Fundación MAPFRE Collections.
Bebe, Savignac de Miremont, 2011
Gelatin silver prints, contact
© Nicholas Nixon.
Fundación MAPFRE Collections.
Nicholas Nixon. The Brown Sisters
–
Intimacy. The passage of time. Vulnerability.
When in 1974 Nicholas Nixon took a photograph of his wife Bebe and his sisters-in-law Mimi, Laurie and Heather, he did not know that this would be the start of the series known today as The Brown Sisters, one of the most compelling investigations of portraiture and time in contemporary photography. Currently, this work in progress, which expands each year with a new image, is composed of 45 images created in silver gelatin.
The series exudes a familiar air that transports us back to past moments and emotions. Its strength lies in its repetition (the four women are always portrayed in the same order, looking at the lens) and in the change of rhythm within that repetition, which has been proceeding, year after year, since 1975. Each of the images takes on body and meaning in relation to the others and, as a whole, contemplated as a series, they become instants of equilibrium within the incessant rhythm of transformation.
Nicholas Nixon (Detroit, Michigan, 1947) occupies an outstanding and singular place in the history of recent photography, combining his personal activity as a photographer with his work as a professor of this discipline at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston up until 2017. His work, which employs a very refined technique and careful composition, draws us into the daily reality of the people he portrays. His closeness and humanity make the viewer participate and identify with the emotions that underlie his images.
Judith Joy Ross
Untitled, Eurana Park, Weatherly, Pensilvania, 1982
© Judith Joy Ross, courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne
Judith Joy Ross
– 18
Comprehension. Personal impulse. Capturing the commonplace.
Judith Joy Ross photographed people as a way of understanding the emotional world of those around her. Today, she is considered one of the most influential portrait artists. It is a genre through which she is able to capture the present, past and future of the individuals who step in front of her camera.
Her portraits are often framed in the context of a previously chosen subject: Eurana Park; visitors to the Vietnam War Memorial; members of Congress during the Iran-Contra (Irangate) scandal; Hazleton school children; and specific places such as Easton, Pennsylvania, where she was born, raised, and still lives today.
Bill Brandt
Río Cuckmere, 1963
Private Collection. Courtesy of the Bill Brandt Archive and the Edwynn Houk Gallery.
© Bill Brandt / Bill Brandt Archive Ltd
Bill Brandt
– 18
Surrealism. Portraiture. The sinister.
Bill Brandt’s conception of photographic language as a powerful means of contemplating and understanding reality, but always from a primacy of aesthetic considerations over documentary aspects, makes him one of the founders of modern photography.
His work expresses a permanent attraction to everything strange, to everything that causes attraction and strangeness and provokes unease. Unheimlich, which is usually translated as “the strange”, “the sinister”, “that which produces uneasiness”, is one of the characteristic features that we find throughout his career.
Almost all of his images, both those of a more social nature from before the war and those from his subsequent more “artistic” stage, are strongly poetic and maintain that halo of strangeness and characteristic mystery where, as in his life, reality and fiction are always mixed.
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