Travelling exhibitions

14.NOV.2024 – 15.FEB.2025

Fundación MAPFRE Canarias (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria)

Identity. Spontaneity. Modernity.

The work of Carlos Pérez Siquier (Almeria, 1930-2021), who was awarded the National Photography Prize in 2003, emerges from a fertile space somewhere between spontaneity and an interest in the human condition, as well as the photographer’s own measured character. His images reveal the transformations of an entire country (and perhaps an entire world) from the peripheral surroundings of Almeria, where he lived throughout his life. Pérez Siquier was a key artist in the development of Spanish photographic modernity.

With this consideration in mind, in 2022, Fundación MAPFRE acquired an important sample of his legacy, which now forms part of the institution’s photography collections.

The exhibition Carlos Pérez Siquier. Fundación MAPFRE Collections comprises a careful selection of that archive and includes images from some of his most emblematic series, such as La Playa (The Beach), Encuentros (Encounters) and Trampas para incautos (Traps for the Unwary).

26.OCT.2024 – 23.FEB.2025

“Mirador del Carmen” Cultural Centre. Estepona Town Hall (Estepona, Malaga)

Modernity. Collecting. Drawing.

Since its inception in 1997, the Fundación MAPFRE drawing collections have been marked by a keen interest in unraveling the birth of modernity. An effort has been made to recover the works on paper of those artists and movements that are significant when it comes to appreciating the evolution of the uses of drawing and painting over the last century.

The selection of more than one hundred drawings presented in the exhibition “Drawing Modernity. From Fortuny to Tapies, Fundación MAPFRE Collections”, covers a period of time that runs from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, precisely the period in which drawing was still experiencing a duality. On the one hand as a means of preparing the final version of another work, while at the same time demonstrating its independence as a form of art that stands on its own merits.

12.OCT.2024 – 16.MAR.2025

Musée des Beaux – Arts Le Locle – MBAL (Le Locle, Switzerland)

Commitment. Respect. Resistance.

The work of Paz Errázuriz (Santiago de Chile, 1944) constantly refers to the political and sociological context of Chile, marked for a long period by the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990). Moved by her interest in exploring the reality of individuals on the fringes of society, the artist began to photograph children, the elderly, men and women in psychiatric institutions, transsexuals, prostitutes, people sleeping unprotected in the street and, more recently, Native Americans. With the passage of time, this interest was transformed into coexistence, trust and respect for her portraits, as evidenced by the extensive body of work the artist has developed throughout her career.

Errázuriz delves into the most uncomfortable nooks and crannies of everyday life in Chile, presenting figures who, from the periphery, reveal, even without an explicit desire to criticize, different forms of resistance to the imposed norms.

31.MAY.2023 – 10.SEP.2023

Museo ICO, Madrid

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.

23.APR.2023 – 06.AUG.2023

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.

18.MAR.2023 – 11.JUN.2023

Huis Marseille, Amsterdam

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.

13.FEB.2023 – 23.APR.2023

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.

26.NOV.2022 – 26.MAR.2023

Fotomuseum Den Haag, The Hague

Personal impulse. Portraiture. Searching for answers.

It took American photographer Judith Joy Ross some time to realise that photography helped her to make the world in which she lived more comprehensible. From that moment on, she has continued to use the medium to try to answer existential questions.

Since the 1980s, Judith Joy Ross has focused her work primarily on the genre of portraiture. Her images have the ability to unite the past, present and future of the individuals who pose in front of her camera. She is not a studio portraitist, nor does she go out into the street to capture a particular subject; instead, she works according to themes, which she calls “occasions”, and in each shot she takes, a kind of recognition is established between herself and the subject, even if this understanding lasts just for an instant, the time it takes to snap the photo.

20.OCT.2022 – 29.JAN.2023

Antiguo Instituto Jovellanos, Gijón

Documentalist. Social. Ironic.

Lee Friedlander has been a photographer almost since he was a teenager and throughout his long career he has produced a wide range of work. His images primarily record what he himself called, in the 1960s, the “American social landscape”.

This exhibition reveals a very prolific, curious artist who is also passionate about music and books, and who is still active today. His work brings together portraits, self-portraits, family photographs, shots of nature or cityscapes, often in series, which he assembles by thematic and stylistic associations developed over a number of years.