Museu Carmen Thyssen Málaga presents "Memory of the streets"

The Museu Carmen Thyssen Málaga presents Memory of the streets: a trip to Barcelona in the 1930s and 1940s through more than forty photographs by Margaret Michaelis, Kati Horna and Montserrat Vidal-Barraquer.

The exhibition, produced in-house and shown at Espai ArtSonat, connects with Street Life: Lisette Model and Helen Levitt in New York - which could be seen until last June 25 in the same room - and proposes a chronologically through the streets of the Ciutat Comtal in three consecutive and key moments within the framework of recent Spanish history. Margaret Michaelis, who arrived from Berlin in 1933, in the context of the Second Republic, portrays the decline of Chinatown and the Raval, denouncing the living conditions of these working-class districts in the context of a city that aspired to to its modernization, transformation and growth. For her part, and just three years later, the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna portrays the quiet life of the streets of Barcelona at the rear of the Civil War.

Finally, and in front of the more documentary look offered by Michaelis and Horna, the Barcelona of the 1940s is captured through the melancholic language of native photographer Montserrat Vidal-Barraquer, who knew how to avoid the restrictions of the moment imposed on women by to present a photograph that is as modern as it is poetic and refined. These images, from the Photographic Archive of Barcelona, the National Archive of Catalonia and the Documental Center of Historical Memory, offer three complementary discourses within street photography that make up a unitary and coherent story, through which the Museum Carmen Thyssen Málaga vindicates the role of women in Spanish street photography, pioneers in a context not conducive to female arts.

With this exhibition, "the Museum continues to claim the indispensable role of women in the artistic narrative of the 20th century, as in the exhibitions we have dedicated to Juana Francés or the photographers Lisette Model, Helen Levitt and Grete Stern", says its director artistic director, Lourdes Moreno, who emphasized that "projects like Memòria dels carrers mark a prominent line in our programming, with special attention to the visual arts and with photography as the main bet".

The exhibition, whose presentation was attended on Monday the 10th by the Málaga Councilor for Culture, Mariana Pineda, will remain open until September 24th, and completes the Museum's bet for this summer, together with the Fervor de Buenos Aires exhibition, which shows 150 photographs by Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern and which can be visited until September 10.