FEB.11.2023                   MAY.07.2023

Leonora Carrington

Revelation

Madrid

FEB.11.2023                   MAY.07.2023

Facundo de Zuviría

Images of Buenos Aires

Madrid

FEB.16.2023                   MAY.14.2023

Ilse Bing

Barcelona

FEB.16.2023                   MAY.14.2023

Anastasia Samoylova

Image Cities

Barcelona

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.

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.

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.

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-19^th 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.