Fundación MAPFRE unveiled its 2023 cultural program in Madrid and Barcelona on December 20. The lineup offers a wide lens on twentieth century art and, for photographers, a glimpse into twenty first century currents, featuring artists such as Anastasya Samoylova and Matthieu Pernot.
The year opens in Madrid with Leonora Carrington. Revelation, joined by Facundo de Zuviría’s Buenos Aires prints. From February 11, visitors can explore these works at Sala Recoletos, Paseo de Recoletos, 23.
Leonora Carrington. Revelation is a collaboration with the ARKEN Museum of Moderne Kunst in Denmark, marking the first Spain-wide retrospective devoted to this impulsive, eclectic creator. Carrington’s curiosity about ecology and women’s rights informed a life-long engagement with diverse themes, including Celtic myth, magic and the occult, nature and animals, psychology, and Tibetan Buddhism. These interests surface across her paintings, drawings, sculptures, and writings.
Facundo de Zuviría’s project centers on close to 200 photographs taken between 1982 and 2022. Esteemed in contemporary photography, the artist has meticulously chronicled urban life over four decades. His images distill the essence of Buenos Aires through a wandering gaze, framing the city’s neighborhoods as a field of ever-evolving, iconic moments. His work earns the moniker of a relentless image hunter.
In Barcelona, KBr Photo Center will present his work after Madrid, alongside Ilse Bing and the winner of the first KBr Photography Award, Anastasia Samoylova.
Ilse Bing’s decade-spanning project surveys a lifetime of photographic exploration. The archive gathers some 190 photographs and documentary material tracing her path from Frankfurt to Paris, where she built a prolific career with major magazine commissions and gallery shows. The narrative also follows her wartime experiences and later exile to the United States. A documentary titled Tres fotógrafas (Three Photographers) will also be screened—further illuminating Bing’s remarkable journey.
The KBr photography award-winning project Image Cities by Anastasia Samoylova looks at how photographs intersect with urban spaces across multiple global cities. The series examines how imagery shapes and sometimes unsettles the identity of a city, highlighting the friction between a presumed urban character and the reality on the ground.
Samoylova’s work can be viewed in Fundación MAPFRE halls on Paseo de Recoletos after the exhibition closes for the season.
Alongside Samoylova, Madrid audiences can enjoy a summer exhibition dedicated to Louis Stettner, who spent much of his life bridging American and European photographic traditions. Since moving to Paris in 1947, Stettner captured street life and intimate interiors in a deeply humanistic style that connected communities from New York to Paris. He studied at the Photo League, worked with notable peers, and remained engaged with the era’s visual dialogues throughout his career.
Barcelona hosts an early June show featuring the Italian photographer Tina Modotti and a broader exploration of the medium’s origins, guided by Jules Ainaud.
Tina Modotti, born in northern Italy, soon moved to the United States and then to Mexico, where her photography and activism intertwined. Her documentary practice addressed social issues with a political conscience and a cosmopolitan spirit that linked figures across Mexico’s artistic and intellectual circles, including Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
The Tina Modotti retrospective compiles the most extensive view of her work to date, alongside an important collection of documents illustrating her vibrant life and activism.
Jules Ainaud, though less widely known, worked for Jean Laurent and documented Catalonia between 1871 and 1872, capturing monuments and landscapes. The Barcelona exhibition repositions Ainaud within the history of photography, highlighting his contributions to the genre’s early development.
Two Madrid showcases close the year. One centers on the sculptor Medardo Rosso, whose late nineteenth to early twentieth century sculpture challenged conventional boundaries and anticipated modern approaches to form and space. Rosso’s practice is celebrated through works that illuminate how sculpture can integrate with surrounding environments rather than simply occupy a niche.
The other Madrid exhibit spotlights French photographer Mathieu Pernot, a key voice in contemporary visual storytelling. Pernot’s images explore themes of ethnicity, migration, conflict, and human resilience, blending documentary clarity with a perceptive, sometimes stark, look at social margins. The works often focus on recurring subjects and people, tracing long-term relationships with places and communities.
The Madrid programs culminate with a Barcelona stop featuring William Eggleston, widely regarded as a pioneer of color photography. In the late 1970s, Eggleston helped legitimize color as a fine art medium, capturing ordinary moments—urban scenes, interiors, and people—in a way that revealed the beauty in everyday life. His work frequently leans into the accidental elegance of mundane scenes, shot with careful, observational posture.
The William Eggleston exhibition is organized by C/O Berlin in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE.
Additionally, a new edition of KBr Alevi’23 emerges from collaboration between KBr Fundación MAPFRE and Grisart, Idep Barcelona, IEFC, and Elisava. This program introduces the next generation of photographers through a curated, multi-institutional platform.
2024
The first 2024 Madrid project centers on Marc Chagall, examining his work through the lens of the artist’s political experiences, including the Russian Revolution, exile, and the Holocaust. The show is grounded in new archival research that illuminates Chagall’s ethical commitments and offers a fresh interpretation of his art.