Travelling exhibitions

MAR.16.2017 – JUN.11.2017

Centro de Cultura Antiguo Instituto Jovellanos. Gijón

For Graciela Iturbide, the camera is just a pretext for knowing the world

Over the course of four decades, the photographer has built up a uniquely singular body of work, essential for understanding the evolution of photography in Mexico and the rest of Latin America. Celebrated for her vision of the native cultures of her own country, which marked her initiation into the world of photography, her work represents a continuous process of exploring life.

Fundación MAPFRE, aware of the importance of her work acquired, between 2008 and 2011, the most complete collection of it in existence: a total of one hundred and eighty-six photographs, comprising an in-depth cross-section of her work, from her early projects right up to some of the more recent ones.

The idea of the exhibition is to offer a journey through all of the artist’s output; without respecting a strict chronological order, her most representative projects interlink and are embedded in the subject matter that best defines her creative imagination.

With Iturbide every image brings us back to the essential: life, death and pleasure. The things that make humankind and the world what they are.

Her work continues to have a major influence on subsequent generations.

FEB.25.2017 – MAY.07.2017

Troyes, Museum of Modern Art

Drawing is one of our most personal and intimate of expressions; an idea, a discovery, a form of expression and introspection of the person who draws. Between the drawer and the paper on which he or she works there is a direct relationship.

Since its beginnings, Fundación MAPFRE has steered its collections towards works on paper in order to appreciate the evolution of the use of drawing in the last century.

Ever since we started collecting in 1997, we have been interested in showing these collections – firstly the Spanish Masters of the 20th Century, and now with a much more international character – in various museums around the world: the Picasso Foundation (Malaga, 2001), Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba (Havana, 2004), the Cervantes Institute of New York (2004-2005), the National Museum of Art of Mexico (2007), the Bass Museum of Art in Miami (2008), the Museum of Art of El Salvador (2015) and the Museum of Fine Arts of Seville (2015-2016).

And now the Museum of Modern Art in Troyes is putting on the exhibition entitled “Dessins de la Fondation MAPFRE”, presenting a selection of 13 works from the collection of 20th century drawings that belong to the Foundation.

Dated between the late 19th century and mid-20th century, these works give us an insight into that conterminous time when drawing still had a dual nature: on the one hand as a creative means of preparing the final execution of another work, while at the same time demonstrating its independence as an artwork that stands on its own merits.

FEB.22.2017 – APR.22.2017

Espacio Cultural MIRA, Pozuelo de Alarcón

Fundación MAPFRE owns the world’s most important collection of Rafael de Penagos’ works, comprising maps of around a hundred works, original drawings and first editions of his published illustrations. His entire oeuvre demonstrates the artist’s huge admiration for modernity.

The transformation that took place in society’s expectations and mentality after the Great War would change a world that could no longer be based on previous values and systems.

At the end of the 19th century, the press established itself as the main means of communication of the masses. Magazines, posters and literary fiction became the main vehicle for disseminating the image of a burgeoning middle class that had become the ‘heroine’ of modern life.

Rafael de Penagos, in this context, was the great creator of Art Deco illustration in Spain. As well as his important aesthetic innovations in the field of graphic illustration, he created a new kind of woman —the so-called “Penagos woman”— characterized by her extreme modernity and sophistication in her dress, her manners and the way she behaved. Through the pages of magazines such as La Esfera, Blanco y Negro, Nuevo Mundo and ABC, and on the posters created for the Circle of Fine Arts and the companies Floralia and Gal, he portrays those “happy years of the 1920s” while configuring a new feminine ideal: “the modern Eve”. The selection made for this exhibition portrays this dialogue between art and life, between the image on the page and its reflection in everyday life.

DEC.16.2016 – MAR.08.2017

FOAM Ámsterdam

After appearing in Fundación MAPFRE’s exhibition halls in Barcelona and Madrid, Black Box can now be visited at the Foam Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam.

The show is presented as a tour through some of the best known photographic series of this Japanese artist.

The work of Hiroshi Sugimoto constitutes a profound meditation on the nature of perception, illusion, representation, life and death.

The exhibition comprises five sections, dedicated to each of the artist’s major series. Seascapes (from 1980 and ongoing), Portraits (1994-1999), Theaters  (from 1976 and ongoing), Dioramas (1976-2012) and Lightning Fields (from 2006 and ongoing). Altogether, the show brings together forty large format pieces covering the last forty years of the artist’s work and also anticipates future additions in that some of the series exhibited are still actively under way.

Born in Tokyo in 1948, Hiroshi Sugimoto moved to the United States in 1970 to study photography. Sugimoto is a multidisciplinary artist who works with sculpture, architecture, installation and photography. He is recognized as one of the most important photographers on the international scene. His works are found in collections such as those of the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Smithsonian and the National Gallery in Washington, and the Tate Gallery in London.

Highly intellectual, his work contains an elevated level of conceptual content that encourages philosophical reflection, and through which the artist has also managed to reinterpret some of the principal genres of the classic tradition of photography. He is also a master craftsman, who rejects digital technology in favor of traditional methods.

His images are characterized by great visual beauty and notable technical virtuosity, emphasized by his habitual use of large formats.

NOV.15.2016 – JAN.22.2017

Esteban Vicente Museum of Contemporary Art. Segovia

Fundación MAPFRE, in collaboration with the Esteban Vicente Museum of Contemporary Art, is exhibiting in Segovia a selection from its photographic archive based on the theme of the portrait.

The show covers almost a century of creativity (1916-2013) through one hundred and fourteen photos by eighteen different photographers, putting an emphasis on the vitality of the whole collection above individual achievements. But, at the same time, the broad period covered pulsates with the inspiration and depth of the best works of each photographer, turning the exhibition into a journey into the extraordinary contemporary adventure represented by the portrait in its immense diversity and complexity.

The selection, arranged into two large sections, “Cities” and “Artists and Models”, offers a very broad overview of the portrait: from fleeting shots of people unaware of the camera to self-portraits that represent the artists’ search for their true self, including the inevitable portraits of those no longer with us, intensely present in the space they occupied.

The artists featured in the exhibition are: Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Harry Callahan, Joan Colom, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Alberto García-Alix, Emmet Gowin, John Gutmann, Jitka Hanzlová, Richard Learoyd, Helen Levitt, Anna Malagrida, Fernando Maquieira, Lisette Model, Robert Frank, Paul Strand and Garry Winogrand.

OCT.27.2016 – JAN.29.2017

Mindepartementet, Art and Photography. Stockholm

Available to be seen for the first time is a dialogue between the photographs of Graciela Iturbide from Mexico and the Swede, Christer Strömholm. Their friendship arose in the 1980s out of their conversations and exchange of views about photography, which is now crystallized in this exhibition organized by Fundación MAPFRE in collaboration with the Mindepartementet, Art and Photography.

The show is structured around fifty-one examples of Iturbide’s work taken from the collection owned by Fundación MAPFRE. Both photographers share work in which the documentary and conceptual traditions go hand-in-hand, facilitating a fluent conversation between them. Both are recipients of the Hasselblad Award, presented annually by the Swedish Academy of the same name and which currently represents the highest accolade a photographer can achieve.

In 2009 Fundación MAPFRE acquired work by Graciela Iturbide for the first time, currently one of the most important collections of the artist in existence, with over 180 pieces.  That same year we put on the most extensive retrospective of the artist that had ever been held up to that point in Spain, placing particular emphasis on her later work which was unknown in Europe until then.

Graciela Iturbide (Mexico City, 1942) is one of the most outstanding Mexican photographers on the contemporary international stage. For over more than four decades she has built up an intense and profoundly singular body of work, essential for understanding how photography in Mexico and the rest of Latin America has evolved. In it she brings together nature and the human condition, reality and dreams, life and death. Her work continues to have a major influence on subsequent generations.