

Current

Leonora Carrington
Arts, 110, 1944
Collection of Stanley and Pearl Goodman NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, USA
© Estate of Leonora Carrington / VEGAP, Madrid, 2023
FEB.11.2023 MAY.07.2023

Facundo de Zuviría
Peinados Permanentes Rosita, Monserrat, 1985
Private collection, Paris. © Facundo de Zuviría
FEB.11.2023 MAY.07.2023

Ilse Bing
Scandale, 1947
Victoria and Albert Museum, Londres, legado de Ilse Bing Wolff
© Estate of Ilse Bing / Victoria and Albert Museum, London
FEB.16.2023 MAY.14.2023
Ilse Bing
Barcelona

Anastasia Samoylova
Green Umbrella, Zurich 2022
© Anastasia Samoylova
FEB.16.2023 MAY.14.2023
Upcoming

Louis Stettner
Brooklyen Promenade, Brooklyn, 1954
Estate of Louis Stettner
© Louis Stettner
MAY.30.2023 AUG.27.2023
Louis Stettner
Fundación MAPFRE Recoletos Exhibition Hall (Madrid)
The work of Louis Stettner (New York, 1922 – Paris, 2016), created over a career of nearly eighty years, reveals a unique and distinctive use of the tradition of American street photography (Stettner trained at the Photo League in New York) and of French humanist photography. He encountered the latter after he moved to Paris in 1947, becoming notably familiar with it due to his close relationship with Brassaï, who became his mentor and introduced him to the Parisian photography world.
Also very directly influenced by the poetry of Walt Whitman and by Marxism’s societal concerns, Stettner’s photographs of New York and Paris reflect the celebration of life and exaltation of the modern city characteristic of Whitman, while his images of workers engaged in their activities explicitly dignify the proletariat.
Featuring more than 180 photographs, this exhibition is one of the most extensive on the artist to be organised in Spain to date, presenting a thematic exploration of his extensive career.

Anastasia Samoylova
Beauty salon, Milan, 2022
© Anastasia Samoylova
MAY.30.2023 AUG.27.2023
Anastasia Samoylova
Fundación MAPFRE Recoletos Exhibition Hall (Madrid)
Following its display at the KBr in Barcelona, Fundación MAPFRE’s Sala Recoletos in Madrid will be presenting Image Cities, the project that earned the Russian-American photographer Anastasia Samoylova the first KBr Photo Award, a biannual competition launched by Fundación MAPFRE in 2021.
Image Cities is a painstaking and exhaustive work which uses different places to focus on the integration of photography and the image in the urban environment. Samoylova updates the vision and language of documentary photography in a working process that she herself defines as artisanal: the photographs are superimposed on each other to create collages in which the human figure is almost always absent or only present on a tiny scale in comparison to the monumentality of the buildings and advertising hoardings. Samoylova’s images express the ambivalences and contradictions of today’s urban landscape: while cities aim to promote individuality, their spaces are progressing towards becoming generic settings in which the specific configuration of each place is losing its individuality due to the anonymity of steel and glass architecture.
Samoylova started her project in Moscow and New York in 2021 and was able to complete it in other cities such as Amsterdam, Paris, London, Brussels, Tokyo, Madrid and Barcelona thanks to the KBr Photo Award.

Tina Modotti
Hands of marionette player, 1929
Centre for Creative Photography (Arizona, USA)
© Tina Modotti
JUN.07.2023 SEP.03.2023
Tina Modotti
KBr Photography Center, Fundación MAPFRE (Barcelona)
The life of Tina Modotti (Udine, Italy, 1896 – Mexico City, 1942) was marked by some of the most significant world events of the 1920s and 1930s. Born in northern Italy, she soon emigrated to the United States where in 1923 she met Edward Weston, who would notably influence her career. That same year they moved together to Mexico where for almost a decade Modotti produced a body of photographic work based on the Modernist aesthetic before opting for a more personal gaze that reflected her way of seeing life. Modotti’s concern for societal issues developed in parallel to her political militancy and activism in the Communist Party, the context in which she met David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. With the aim of awakening the viewer’s conscience, Modotti produced photographs that denounce injustice and pay tribute to the poor and marginalised. Characterised by their powerfully propagandistic feel, some of these images were taken for newspapers and magazines.
Following an intensive research project due to Modotti’s relatively small output, this exhibition has been able to bring together around 200 photographs, most of them vintage prints, in addition to associated documentary material. Also included are works by photographers of her circle, such as Edward Weston, and one of the Hollywood films in which Modotti appeared.

Barcelona: Plaza del Comercio, formerly Plaza del Palacio. Biblioteca Nacional
JUN.07.2023 SEP.03.2023
Jules Ainaud’s Catalonia (1871-1872)
KBr Photography Center, Fundación MAPFRE (Barcelona)
The work of this almost unknown photographer can now be seen for the first time after it was first created in Barcelona one hundred and fifty years ago. Jules Ainaud always worked for the celebrated Jean Laurent, whose studio was one of the major centres of photographic production in Spain from the mid-19th century to 1885.
Ainaud was among the photographers whom Laurent regularly “commissioned” to take photographs of Spain’s different provinces in order to complete his catalogue. In this case, Ainaud photographed the east coast of Spain and much of Catalonia in the years between 1870 and 1872. The exhibition, which has reunited almost all of Ainaud’s images of Catalonia, aims to relocate the photographer in the position that he deserves within the history of photography.
Past exhibitions

If you were unable to visit one of our exhibitions, or you would like to revisit the feelings you experienced when viewing a particular work, you can do so here in our past exhibitions section.