Travelling exhibitions

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.