SEP.22.2023                   JAN.07.2024

Medardo Rosso

Pioneer of modern sculpture

Madrid

SEP.22.2023                   JAN.07.2024

Mathieu Pernot

Document/Monument

Madrid

SEP.22.2023                   JAN.07.2024

Sorolla and Summer

Madrid

SEP.28.2023                   JAN.28.2024

William Eggleston

Mystery of the Ordinary

Barcelona

SEP.28.2023                   JAN.28.2024

KBr Flama 23

Barcelona

SEP.22.2023                   JAN.07.2024

Medardo Rosso

Fundación MAPFRE Recoletos Exhibition Hall (Madrid)

Known for his depictions of ordinary, often humble and marginalized individuals, Medardo Rosso (Turin, 1858-Milan, 1928) was one of the sculptors who, at the turn of the 19th to 20th century, contributed to freeing sculpture from the weight of the academic tradition. One of his goals was to capture the different conditions of the human being —joy, sadness and helplessness—, which led him to work unceasingly on variations of the same character or theme. Curated by Gloria Moure, this exhibition revives the memory of this artist through a hundred works including sculptures, photographs and drawings. Through these, we can clearly appreciate the extent to which Rosso’s ideas and approaches respond to a vision far removed from his time and which were, therefore, pivotal to sculptural creation in the twentieth century.

SEP.22.2023                   JAN.07.2024

Mathieu Pernot

Document-monument

Fundación MAPFRE Recoletos Exhibition Hall (Madrid)

The work of Mathieu Pernot (Fréjus, France, 1970), one of the most outstanding artists on the current scene, reflects his atypical and alternative approach to photography. Documento-monumento [Document-monument] is the first ever presentation in Spain of a tour through his almost 30 years of artistic production. In his photographs, Pernot mixes motifs related to current issues (ethnic minorities, urban planning in the peripheries, refugees, immigration, wars…) with others that refer to more personal questions, using a style in which the documentary is combined with archival work and approaches from other genres. The exhibition spans his early work as a student at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles up to his most recent projects, including Le Grand Tour, awarded the biannual Henri-Cartier-Bresson Prize in 2019. In addition to this accolade, Pernot has won the Prix Nadar (2013) for his collaboration with Philippe Artières looking at the archives of the Bon Sauveur psychiatric hospital in Picauville (Normandy), and the Prix Niépce in 2014.

SEP.22.2023                   JAN.07.2024

Sorolla’s summers

Fundación MAPFRE Recoletos Exhibition Hall (Madrid)

This exhibition, with which Fundación MAPFRE joins in the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Sorolla’s death, allows us, through a small but very select selection of works, to retrace the painter’s artistic journey through the presentation of the most popular theme of his career, beach scenes, and to show the uniqueness of an artistic vision that oscillated between tradition and modernity, between the vernacular and the cosmopolitan.

SEP.28.2023                   JAN.28.2024

William Eggleston

Mystery of the Ordinary

KBr Photography Center, Fundación MAPFRE (Barcelona)

Considered the father of colour photography as, in the 1970s, he was able to achieve recognition for this art form as being admissible in art galleries and museums, William Eggleston (Memphis, 1939) is one of the most influential figures in contemporary photography.

His images, seemingly simple and straightforward in appearance, are always appealing. Armed with his Leica, which replaced a Canon from his university years, he abandoned his studies to devote himself to photography around 1957. Influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive instant”, by Robert Frank and Eugène Atget, and after his initial work in black and white around the suburbs of Memphis, Eggleston began to shoot everything around him with a clear artistic intention and in colour, as if through his pictures he sought to reveal the aesthetic potential of the everyday: old shoes, freezers full of food, the inside of a bathroom, a woman’s legs, a road sign, an old lorry, a tree, and so on, in a body of work whose true motif seems to be none other than life itself.

Undoubtedly influenced by pop culture, from 1965 onwards Eggleston worked solely in colour. On the advice of Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, he showed his work to MoMA’s curator of photography, John Szarkowski, who welcomed it enthusiastically and devoted an exhibition to it at the museum in 1976, the first in the institution’s history to feature exclusively colour photography. Together with Stephen Shore, Eggleston reclaimed the American vernacular during this decade. In 1988 Eggleston received the Hasselblad Foundation International Award and in 2004 he was awarded the PHotoEspaña Baume et Mercier Prize.

SEP.28.2023                   JAN.28.2024

KBr FLAMA’2023

KBr Photography Center, Fundación MAPFRE (Barcelona)

KBr Fundación MAPFRE is hosting the third edition of KBr Flama, an annual project to support young talent. The exhibition brings together the projects of Alan Balzac (Galicia, 1989), Ivette Blaya (Santa Margarida de Montbui, Barcelona, 2000), Rocío Madrid (Melilla, 1988) and Lucía Morón (Buenos Aires), who are starting their professional careers after training at the IEFC, Idep Barcelona, Elisava – Faculty of Design and Engineering of Barcelona, and Grisart schools, respectively. Their works were selected from among those of other students from the aforementioned schools by a panel comprising Mónica Allende (Artistic Director of the GetxoPhoto Festival, Bilbao), David Armengol (Director of La Capella, Barcelona), Irene de Mendoza (Artistic Director of the Foto Colectania Foundation, Barcelona) and Anna Planas (Artistic Director at Paris Photo).