Art and culture
Consuelo Kanaga
Tennessee, 1950
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
MAY.30.2024 – AUG.25.2024, MAD
Consuelo Kanaga
Catch the Spirit
Over a career spanning six decades, American photographer Consuelo Kanaga (1894-1976) captured the social conflicts of her time, from urban poverty to the struggle for workers’ rights, racial segregation and social inequality.
A pioneer of photojournalism, she also mastered genres such as still life, but became especially known for her emotive and introspective social portraits of African Americans, in which she combined modernist formal techniques and a radical documentary approach. This exhibition, organized in collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum, retraces her career in an extensive selection of her photographs (mostly vintage prints), together with some material from her own archive.
David Goldblatt
The dethroning of Cecil John Rhodes, after the throwing of human feces on the statue and the agreement of the university to the demands of students for its removal, the University of Cape Town, 9 April 2015.
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, purchased with a gift from Jane P. Watkins, M.P.H. 1979; with the Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., Class of 1913, Fund; and with support from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 2022.37.515. © The David Goldblatt Legacy Trust.
MAY.30.2024 – AUG.25.2024, MAD
David Goldblatt
No ulterior motive
The renowned South African photographer David Goldblatt (1930-2018) dedicated his life to documenting his country and its people. Renowned for his subtle portraits of life under apartheid, his work, with its wide range of themes, is now essential to understanding what is undoubtedly one of the most painful processes and periods in contemporary history. David Goldblatt was the first South African artist to have a solo exhibition at MOMA in New York (1998) and has been distinguished with, among others, the Hasselblad (2006) and Henri Cartier-Bresson (2009) awards.
Organized in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago and the Yale University Art Gallery, this wide-ranging retrospective brings together much of his work and also draws, for the first time, connections with other South African photographers from one to three generations later who acknowledge their debt to Goldblatt as a mentor.
Consuelo Kanaga
Tennessee, 1950
Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga
© Brooklyn Museum
FEB.15.2024 – MAY.12.2024, BCN
Consuelo Kanaga
Catch the Spirit
Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit traces for the first time in Spain and Europe the entire career of this American photographer. Kanaga (1894-1978) is considered a fundamental figure in the history of contemporary photography, both for her contribution to the recognition of women in the field of photography and for the intensity with which her images confront the viewer with some of the great social issues of our time, especially the situation of the African-American population in the United States.
Antoni Rosal Grelon
Grupo de hombres alrededor de un pequeño estanque, décadas de 1910-1920
Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya (ANC), Fons Antoni Rosal Grelon, Sant Cugat del Vallès
FEB.15.2024 – MAY.12.2024, BCN
The domestic camera
Amateur photography in Catalonia (ca. 1880-1936)
For decades, amateur photography remained on the margins of the official history of photography, mainly because of its character as a mass activity and the shortcomings of many of its productions. For some time now, however, it has been the subject of attention for the way in which it manifests the social and cultural realities of its time. This exhibition traces its evolution in Catalonia from its beginnings around 1880 to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
Bleda y Rosa
Mercado [Market]. Door of the Miletus market. Pergamon Museum, Berlin, 2021. Series Tipologies
© Bleda y Rosa, VEGAP, Barcelona, 2023
Bleda y Rosa
–
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.
Judith Joy Ross
Untitled, Eurana Park, Weatherly, Pensilvania, 1982
© Judith Joy Ross, courtesy Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne
Judith Joy Ross
–
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.
Carlos Pérez Siquier
Marbella, 1974
© Pérez Siquier, VEGAP, Madrid, 2023
Carlos Pérez Siquier
–
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.
Paul Strand
Wall Street, New York, 1915
Fundación MAPFRE Collections
© Aperture Foundation Inc., Paul Strand Archive
Paul Strand. Direct beauty. Photographs from the Fundación MAPFRE Collections
–
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.