The Mapfre KBR Foundation presents its new exhibition program for 2023

This past Thursday at noon, the new exhibition program of the KBr Fundació Mapfre Photography Center for 2023 was presented. Nadia Arroyo, director of Culture, who was accompanied by Carlos Gollonet, curator of photography, and María Pfaff participated in this event , coordinator of the KBr center.

Pel programa expositiu pel 2023, la Fundació Mapfre ha disposat d'un pressupost de tres milions i té previst editar aproximadament un total de 3.000 catàlegs en castellà, mil en català i la resta que pot variar des dels 2.000 als 8.000 catàlegs a nivell internacional normalment published in English.

According to Arroyo, the exhibition program that the Foundation will follow will be, as always, more international, with historical and established photographers or large retrospectives. It must be said that the cost of each large exhibition usually ranges from half a million.

For his part, Carlos Gollonet presented the artists who will exhibit from the beginning of 2023 until January 2024.
From February 15 to May 14, the first retrospective made in Spain of the German photographer Ilse Bing (1899-1998) will be inaugurated, curated by Juan Vicente Aliaga. Bing's project includes 190 photographs and documentary material distributed in ten sections that chronologically cover his entire life and work.

The next exhibition will be that of Anastasia Samoylova (Moscow, 1984) at Espai 2 entitled Image Cities, which can be visited until May 14 and is curated by Ma Victòria del Val. From June 6 to September 3, the exhibition of nearly 200 photographs by Tina Modotti (Udine, Italy, 1896-Mexico City, 1942) will be inaugurated, most of which are vintage copies and documentary material. In addition, the works of photographers from his immediate environment such as Edward Weston will also be present, as well as one of the films that Modotti starred in in Hollywood.

The exhibition entitled La Catalunya by Jules Ainaud (1871-1872), A photographer admiring what is beautiful can be visited until September 3. This exhibition, which has been curated by Jep Martí, is the third that the KBr center has organized with the aim of making known the photographic collections preserved in the Catalan archives.

The last exhibition that will close in 2023 will be that of William Eggleston (Memphis, Tennessee, 1939) who is considered one of the most influential photographers in contemporary photography. This exhibition has been curated by Fèlix Hoffmann and organized by C/O Berlin in collaboration with the Mapfre Foundation.

Regarding the KBr Flama project, which is born from the collaboration between the KBr Fundació Mapfre photography center and four institutions that are Grisart, Idep Barcelona, IEFC and Elisava, Faculty of Design and Engineering of Barcelona, Nadia Arroyo informed that The Foundation will dedicate an annual exhibition at the KBr to the young talents that come out of these schools and explained that it is currently working on the selection process of the next creators who will be part of the next edition of the KBr Flama '23 with the aim of giving - them the opportunity to participate in all the phases of the process of creating the exhibition and the edition of the corresponding catalog as part of their artistic training.

On the other hand, the Foundation has also launched a new collections website, with a more attractive design and much more accessible to the user. Through this new web portal you can get to know the more than 2,500 works of art that make up the Foundation's heritage, with the aim of making its funds as widely available as possible.

Workshops, talks and publications

María Pfaff presented the schedule of conferences and educational activities for 2023 and informed that in March and October 2023 Arianna Rinaldo's Get Real Workshops (Open your eyes!) will take place, which are biannual workshops taught by renowned photographers where the most relevant topics of contemporary photographic practice are addressed with the aim of promoting a meeting that will help to learn and enjoy in depth everything that photography offers as a field of expression and creation.

Regarding the subject of the talks, conferences and dialogues will be held in February, June and October 2023 in which the protagonists of the current exhibitions will share their impressions. As for example, in February there will be a conversation with Anastasia Samoylova about her Image Cities project, and with Juan Vicente Aliaga about the Ilse Bing exhibition, curated by himself. In June, the curators Isabel Tejeda and Jep Martí i Baiget will talk about the exhibitions Tina Modotti and La Catalunya de Jules Ainaud (1871-72). From February 28 to March 2, a cycle will be held led by Laura Terré, curator of the commemoration of the centenary of Francesc Català-Roca in 2022, to expand the knowledge of the photographer's work under the creative gaze of current thinkers such as collective Criteam or Aurora Fernández Polanco. For the months of October and November, a cycle of three sessions will be held on photography from a literary perspective.

Finally, in November, the Foundation will collaborate with the Panoràmic festival with the realization of a cycle of conferences on the theme to which the 2023 edition is dedicated: the face and the idea of the post-portrait or portrait in the era of facial recognition, biotechnology, data mining and plastic surgery.

Publication of two books

As for the publications on the conferences, a homonymous book is presented that collects all the presentations from each cycle accompanied by a foreword by the director. The books Photography and Exhibition have been published so far. Crossed knowledge and Photography speaks of revolutions. The volume of the Restitutions cycle is currently being prepared. Photography in debt to the past, which will appear at the beginning of 2023.

The second book to be published will refer to the photographic language and its expressive resources. The essential concepts of light and color, revealed by Arola Valls and explained through a text and illustrated with images of works from the Mapfre Foundation Collections, will be the protagonists of this first volume.