Art and culture
![Conversazione in giardino [Talk in the garden], 1896-1897](/media/arte-cultura/exposiciones/rosso-768x576-1.jpg "Medardo Rosso")
Medardo Rosso
Conversazione in giardino [Talk in the garden], 1896-1897
Bronze
© Galleria Nazionale d´Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Roma
SEP.22.2023 – JAN.07.2024, MAD
Medardo Rosso
Pioneer of modern sculpture
Deeply misunderstood in his day, valued only by those at the cutting edge of art, the work of Medardo Rosso (Turin, 1858-Milan, 1928) is today extremely innovative and ahead of its time. The artist, who preferred to leave Italy and flee from academicism in search of Parisian cosmopolitanism, was a visionary who, with his more experimental work, which is the focus of this exhibition, proposed a break with the sculptural tradition, advancing the aesthetic approaches that would later be followed by the great sculptors of the 20th century.
Mathieu Pernot
Palmira, 2021
Courtesy of the artist
© Mathieu Pernot
SEP.22.2023 – JAN.07.2024, MAD
Mathieu Pernot
Document/Monument
With an unconventional and alternative approach, the work of Mathieu Pernot (1972) explores the margins of society through themes that are recurrently and transversally intertwined in his career: migrants, displaced persons, victims of war, the gipsy…His images incorporate elements of documentary photography and archive work to end up conveying a vision of these realities far removed from univocal or immutable interpretations.
Document/Monument is the first retrospective exhibition to be presented in Spain of a work that has already been recognized by relevant awards (the Nadar in 2013, the Niépce in 2014 and, more recently, in 2019, the prestigious Henri Cartier-Bresson) that place Pernot among the most prominent names on the panorama of contemporary photography.
Joaquín Sorolla
Nadadora (Swimmer), Jávea, 1905
Museo Sorolla, Madrid
SEP.22.2023 – JAN.07.2024, MAD
Sorolla and Summer
Summer leisure on the beach is one of the themes that runs through the entire work of Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923). Always captured from life, the depictions of working at the sea and summer leisure on the beach are probably the most popular in his oeuvre and are also an interesting testimony to the evolution of the sea environment in relation to its therapeutic properties and the emergence of summer as a period of entertainment and sociability throughout the 19th century.
Sorolla and Summer presents a careful selection of forty works (half of them small-format) on this essential theme in the career of the great Valencian artist.
William Eggleston
Untitled, c. 1970-1973
© Eggleston Artistic Trust
Courtesy Eggleston Artistic Trust and David Zwirner
SEP.28.2023 – JAN.28.2024, BCN
William Eggleston
Mystery of the Ordinary
William Eggleston (1939, Memphis, Tennessee, USA) is a living legend of photography. In 1976 the MoMA (New York) organised a single-artist exhibition of his work, making him the first photographer to have a large-scale colour photograph exhibited in a museum. Along with other great contemporary photographers such as Gary Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, Eggleston was part of a generation of authors whose work in the 1970s broke free of many of the rules and restrictive concepts of the medium, one of the most important of which was that artistic photography could only be artistic if it was in black and white. William Eggleston, Mystery of the Ordinary is one of the most extensive exhibitions to date in Spain on this exceptional photographer.
Rocío Madrid
Serie Melilla, 2021
© Rocío Madrid
SEP.28.2023 – JAN.28.2024, BCN
KBr Flama 23
KBr Fundación MAPFRE presents the third edition of the annual appointment with the emerging creation of the new generations of photographers starting their professional careers after their studies in Barcelona. This year the exhibition will feature the projects of Alan Balzac (Galicia, 1999), Ivette Blaya (Santa Margarida de Montbui, Barcelona, 2000), Rocío Madrid (Melilla, 1988) and Lucía Morón (Buenos Aires, 1997), selected through a selection process with professionals from the sector.
Bleda y Rosa
Mercado [Market]. Door of the Miletus market. Pergamon Museum, Berlin, 2021. Series Tipologies
© Bleda y Rosa, VEGAP, Barcelona, 2023
Bleda y Rosa
–
Dialectics. Tales of memory. Landscape.
Without a doubt, María Bleda (Castellón, 1969) and José María Rosa (Albacete, 1970) are one of the most unique artistic duos on the contemporary Spanish photographic scene. For three decades they have been exploring together, through rigorous and profound visual research, the dialectic between landscape and territory, between history and memory, between image and text.
Winners of the 2008 National Photography Prize, Bleda and Rosa have developed a language of their own, between the visual and the textual, as a means of reflecting on the different meanings and evocations that the human gaze conjures in contemplation of the landscape, as reflected in the series Campos de fútbol [Footbal pitches], Campos de batalla [Battlefields], Origen [Origin] and Prontuario [Compendium]. For the first time ever, this exhibition brings together their entire body of work, presented in a video installation where projections invite us to experience their art with other contemplative rhythms.
Judith Joy Ross
Untitled, Eurana Park, Weatherly, Pensilvania, 1982
© Judith Joy Ross, courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne
Judith Joy Ross
–
Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA.
Personal. Portraiture. Existencial.
Through her lens, the American photographer Judith Joy Ross explores the emotional world of those around her, seeking to answer existential questions. Influenced by Lewis Hine, August Sander and Diane Arbus, the photographer has become one of the most influential artists in the portrait genre, demonstrating that she is capable of capturing the present, past and future of the individuals who happen across her camera.
In the 1980s, after several trips to Europe, Ross acquired an 8 x 10 inch camera so that she could take portraits of “ordinary people” in public places, usually working class individuals, like herself, with whom she establishes a unique relationship. Through her photographs she does not seek to glorify or judge the subjects she portrays, simply to portray their most human side.
Carlos Pérez Siquier
Marbella, 1974
© Pérez Siquier, VEGAP, Madrid, 2023
Carlos Pérez Siquier
–
The edge of society. Culture shock. Color.
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. This artistic endeavor earned him the National Photography Award in 2003.
His photographic series deal with the edge of society, the visual alterations triggered in the environment by the Franco-era developmentalism, and the cultural shock produced by the enormous influx of foreign tourists in Spain, up to his retreat, in the latter stages of his life, to more personal spheres. As a retrospective, this exhibition covers his most iconic series, produced between 1957 and 2018, with an important number of previously unpublished images and documentary contributions that enrich his discourse.
Paul Strand
Wall Street, New York, 1915
Fundación MAPFRE Collections
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive
Paul Strand. Direct beauty. Photographs from the Fundación MAPFRE Collections
–
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris
Straight photography. Abstraction. Documentary.
Born in New York, Paul Strand (1890-1976) was a man ahead of his time, fusing socially committed photography with more modern trends that explored naturalness, laying the foundations of what would later be known as “straight photography”. This artistic process stemmed from his knowledge of contemporary art derived from his relationship with artists and theorists, such as Alfred Stieglitz, together with his intuition and his capacity for synthesis.
The exhibition features a wide selection (110 images) of Strand’s photographs from Fundación MAPFRE’s collection, focusing on the different themes explored by the artist: geometries, landscapes, portraits and countries. Therefore, it does not only include his landscapes and urban scenes, marked both by a search for abstraction and a documentary approach, but also a number of anonymous faces portrayed with great naturalness, offering us an intimate perspective.
