Travelling exhibitions

06.DEC.2024 – 02.MAR.2025

Centro Andaluz de la Fotografía (Almeria)

Social commitment. Poetry. Belief in the human being.

Louis Stettner (New York, 1922-Paris, 2016) was trained at the Photo League school in New York. In Paris he met Brassaï, who became his mentor. His experience as a photographer during the Second World War profoundly conditioned his understanding of life. This is reflected in his work, which is based on a firm belief in the human being.

Stettner’s work encompasses a multitude of subjects, from almost empty urban environments to bustling scenes of the New York subway, the routines of workers and laborers, and the mountainous landscapes of the French Alpilles massif in his later years.

Louis Stettner’s work was not given the recognition it deserved at the time. This exhibition aims to mitigate this lack of recognition and make the general public aware of the artist. It also celebrates the work of a creator whose photography captured the poetry of everyday life.

05.DEC.2024 – 02.FEB.2025

Museo Gustavo de Maeztu (Estella, Navarra)

Singularity. Eccentricity. Darkness.

Fundación MAPFRE has an important collection of José Gutiérrez Solana’s engravings, including twenty-six of the twenty-eight etchings catalogued by Rafael Díaz-Casariego and four of the seven surviving lithographs. These offer a representative view of the artist’s body of work, undoubtedly one of the most singular figures of 20th century ¬Spanish art.

Both his life and his work reveal an eccentric personality, impossible to pigeonhole within the framework of the conventional artistic scene.¬ Creating a deeply personal vision, in his paintings, etchings and lithographs, as well as in his texts, Solana seems to approach the Spanish literature of his time, although he remains oblivious to any sense of criticism or regenerationism. On the contrary, he shows us a dark reality within which he seems to move with absolute ease.

16.NOV.2024 – 16.FEB.2025

Cascais Cultural Centre (Cascais, Portugal)

Social concern. Simplicity. Intimacy.

Nicholas Nixon (Detroit, Michigan, 1947) explores singular worlds with notable social concern, revealing unnoticed aspects of reality pertaining to the artist’s private experiences. However, given their everyday nature, we can identify with them and they easily evoke in us the echo of memories and emotions. Nixon employs a simple, almost obsolete, but flawless technique; the use of large-format cameras imposes a closeness and the cooperation of the subjects to reveal nearby worlds which grab his attention: the elderly, the sick, the intimacy between couples and the family.

This retrospective on his work (1974-2024) features more than 200 photographs. In it we find a clear guiding thread, a world of its own that has no limits and an extraordinary capacity for reinvention.

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.