Travelling exhibitions

14.JUN.2025 – 25.SEP.2025

Photo Arsenale Wien (Vienna, Austria)

Timeless. Observant. Instinctive.

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 – 2004), was a photojournalist, artistic photographer and portraitist, he crafted timeless compositions and shaped the style of later generations of photographers. In 1947, he founded the Magnum photo agency alongside Robert Capa, George Rodger and David “Chim” Seymour.

A patient and silent observer, yet nimble and expeditious, the artist captured scenes of people and key events in 20th-century history, earning him the nickname “the eye of the century”. With his talent for finding the “decisive moment”, he captured spontaneous encounters and situations and became one of the most important representatives of street photography. His works, many of which have become iconic today, depict, as if he were an anthropologist, some of the most important events of the 20th century.

With a diverse and varied oeuvre, the exhibition presented by Fundación MAPFRE traces his entire career; from his beginnings, influenced by Surrealism and the New Vision, through photojournalism, where some of his lesser-known reports from the 1960s are particularly noteworthy, to the intimate style of his later years.

12.JUN.2025 – 30.SEP.2025

Fundación Tony Catany (Llucmajor, Mallorca)

Humanism. Commitment. Social document.

In Mallorca, Fundación MAPFRE is presenting a retrospective exhibition on the photographer Christer Strömholm (Stockholm, 1918-2002), one of the most emblematic European photographers of the post-war period, whose work, imbued with humanism and social commitment, has a certain documentary character.

From a very young age, Strömholm traveled extensively around the world. After the war, in 1947, he returned to Paris, where he realized that photography allowed him to express himself in line with his desired style. From that moment on, he never stopped taking pictures. In his own words: “I don’t take photographs, I create images. That’s what I’ve done all my life.”

Strömholm finds valuable messages in everything, even in the most humble of objects, to which he gives meaning and resonance through his photographs, which are simply an extension of his own life.

14.MAR.2025 – 03.AUG.2025

Brooklyn Museum of Art (New York, USA)

Modernity. Social justice. Unconventional.

This exhibition covers the six decades of work by Consuelo Kanaga (1894-1978), a key figure in the history of modern photography, both for her contribution to women being recognized in this field and for her images that confront the viewer with some of the major social issues of the 20th century.

The life and photography of this American photographer reflected her concern for social justice. She was truly interested in people and their problems: social marginalization, poverty, racial harassment, and inequality, especially in relation to the African American population in the United States.

An unconventional figure deeply committed to social justice, Consuelo Kanaga was ahead of her time. She worked as a photojournalist and was one of the few women to maintain close ties with the American avant-garde circles in San Francisco and New York.

20.MAR.2025 – 08.JUN.2025

Antiguo Instituto Jovellanos (Gijón, Asturias)

Poetry. Street photography. Lyrical humanism.

Louis Stettner (New York, 1922-Paris, 2016) trained at the New York Photo League school, where he studied under Sid Grossman and coincided with Weegee, who would become a great friend of his. In Paris he met Brassaï, who became his mentor. However, despite being fully immersed in the debate on historical photography for a good part of the last century, his work was not given the recognition it deserved at the time, perhaps because it did not adhere to a specific style.

Straddling New York and Paris, Stettner was rooted in two worlds at a time when most photographers could only relate to one. In this sense, his work contains aesthetic elements of both New York street photography, with its bustling subway scenes, and the lyrical humanism of the French tradition, with the mountainous landscapes of the Alpilles in France.

11.MAR.2025 – 02.MAY.2025

Fundación MAPFRE Canarias (La Laguna, Tenerife)

Modernity. Intuition. Originality.

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.

If there is something that characterizes and makes the photography of Carlos Pérez Siquier so valuable and interesting, it is, on the one hand, the theme that runs through it from beginning to end–the author’s real and immediate world–and, on the other, the keen and unique gaze that the photographer poured into the images. This results in one of the most powerful and important bodies of work in Spanish photography from recent decades, which earned him the 2003 Spanish National Photography Prize.

26.FEB.2025 – 29.JUN.2025

Museu de Artes Contemporânea – MAC (Lisboa, Portugal)

Talent. Opposition. Feminism.

In 1943, the collector Peggy Guggenheim organized one of the first exhibitions exclusively dedicated to the work of female artists in her New York gallery, Art of This Century. Entitled Exhibition by 31 Women, one of its aims was to highlight the contribution of women artists, who had often been relegated to the role of muses, imitators or companions of famous male artists due to the patriarchal mentality of the time.

The artists selected for 31 Women–including both established creators and emerging talents–came from Europe and the United States, and many of them were linked to surrealism and abstract art. Aware of the challenges they faced as women, these artists often swam against the tide, using the dominant artistic languages of their time: they reinterpreted the concepts of surrealism and abstract expressionism to reveal the patriarchal precepts on which these movements were based.

21.FEB.2025 – 22.JUN.2025

Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT, USA)

Apparent calm. Privilege. Apartheid.

The prestigious South African photographer David Goldblatt (Randfontein, 1930 – Johannesburg, 2018) dedicated his life to documenting his country and its people. Known for his subtle portraits of life under apartheid, his work, which covers a wide range of subjects, is today indispensable for understanding what is undoubtedly one of the most painful processes and difficult periods in contemporary history.

The keys to the exhibition revolve around three themes: the representation of everyday life, “the quiet and the ordinary where nothing ‘happened’”, so that the viewer could draw their own conclusions; the greater freedom to document life in South Africa in the most honest and direct way possible on account of being white; and the need to document apartheid.

21.FEB.2025 – 15.JUNE.2025

Museo de Bellas Artes de Castellón (Castellón)

Tradition. Vanguardism. Tempered cubism.

Daniel Vázquez Díaz (Aldea de Ríotinto (now Nerva), Huelva, 1882 – Madrid, 1969) attended classes at the Ateneo de Sevilla. After spending some time in Madrid in 1906, he moved to Paris, where he lived for around twelve years. In the French capital he socialized with the Spanish artists who had settled there: Ignacio Zuloaga, Joaquim Sunyer, Hernén Anglada Camarasa, Juan de Echevarría, Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, among others. In France he produced Spanish-inspired paintings in the fashionable style of the day, as well as portraits in the tradition of the Spanish Golden Age. Meanwhile, he learned about the new avant-garde trends that he would begin to develop after returning to Spain in 1918.

Upon settling in Madrid for good, Vázquez Díaz’s work was embraced by critics and the intellectuals around him as part of the new art, which in this case was referred to as tempered cubism.

21.FEB.2025 – 20.APR.2025

Casa Museo Zavala (Cuenca)

Challenge. Infancy. Self-portrait.

Fundación MAPFRE presents a retrospective exhibition on the work of Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm (Stockholm, 1918-2002), one of the most iconic figures in post-war European photography, who received his greatest recognition somewhat late in life, when he was awarded the Hasselblad Prize in 1997.

The photographer’s intuitive work expresses a unique world of images into which he pours all his senses and experience and with which he challenges all kinds of prejudices and stereotypes. Strömholm finds valuable meanings in the humblest of objects, to which he gives significance.

In 1958, Strömholm bought a dilapidated house in a remote village in the French region of Provence, where he began to collect all kinds of broken, discarded objects, which for him represented mementos of his own life and childhood. Strömholm always identified with children; as he himself pointed out, his images are self-portraits, representations of himself at different ages.