Exhibitions in 2012

The exhibition explored the scope of this pioneer of modernist photography, offering a new perspective of works that continue to amaze and inspire due to the complexity of their perspectives and themes. It covered her whole life and artistic career, spanning almost seventy years of work. The exhibition included the revealing abstract images of plants and nudes, optical illusions created by techniques such as double exposure, and many of her iconic portraits of artists, dancers, actors, musicians and great philosophers of the 20th century.

This exhibition presented the work of the French designer Jean Paul Gaultier for the first time in Spain. It was the first international retrospective dedicated to the designer, the so-called “enfant terrible” of the fashion world, and addressed the artist, his work and his influence in the world. The exhibition featured a selection of his creations from the 1970s through to 2010, many of them from the artist’s personal collection.

The objective of this exhibition was to show eighty masterpieces by some of the great artists in the collections of the Musée National d’Art Moderne-Centre Pompidou (MNAM-CP) in Paris, serving as a basis to consider how the genre of portraiture has formed part of the different artistic movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. The chronological period covered by the exhibition started with the portrait of Erik Satie by Suzanne Valadon in 1892-1893 and ended with The Moroccan, by John Currin, in 2001.

This exhibition was the biggest-ever international retrospective of Jitka Hanzlová and included nine of her photographic series in chronological order. The selection was the result of meticulous curation in building links between the current series and the older ones, with the aim of offering a consistent overview of the last twenty years of her work.

A comprehensive retrospective of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), one of the leading exponents of German expressionism, the co-founder of the famous Brücke group [Bridge] in 1905 and one of the great architects of modernity. In this sense, the exhibition served as a major turning point in the Spanish public’s interpretation of Kirchner.

For the first time in Madrid, Fundación MAPFRE presented the work of E.O. Hoppé (Munich, 1878 – London 1968). Having lived in Great Britain since 1902, Emil Otto Hoppé took his first photographs in 1907. He soon achieved success, thanks to which his work became a true reflection of the intellectual and artistic effervescence in England in the first half of the 20th century.

A retrospective of the North American photographer Lewis Hine (Wisconsin, 1874 – New York, 1940), one of the key figures in the aesthetics of social documentalism. This exhibition presented the work of a photographer who was concerned about the welfare of the most disadvantaged people and used photography to reflect the injustice and poverty of that time.

This was the first major monographic exhibition of Odilon Redon in Spain. He began his career as an engraver under Rodolphe Bresdin and ended it in the era of color and ornate decoration, including the series that he called his “Noirs”, very much attuned with symbolism, through to the mythological scenes of the incandescent Chariot of Apollo, an ode to light.