Modotti darrere de Modotti

The artistic value of Tina Modotti (Údine, 1896-Mexico City, 1942) has been overshadowed for years by biased readings of her work that prioritized the love biography (among others, she was romantically linked to the photographer Edward Westoon and the activists Julio Antonio Mella and Vittorio Vidali) or the political commitment (he was a member of the Communist Party and the International Red Aid) in his work. Added to all this is the difficulty of accessing a large part of her production, scattered or misplaced in the various countries she crossed in her nomadic life, a varied occupation (theatre and film actress, photography model) and a discontinuous dedication , and finally abandoned, in the profession. And, as a colophon, her "double status as a woman and a photographer", factors, as the curator of the exhibition, Isabel Tejeda points out, that ended up excluding her from the traditional histories of art, which relegated to female creators in the role of muses or teachers' apprentices (the case of the Modotti-Weston tandem) and photography in a subordinate position within the arts.

The Tina Modotti exhibition takes part in the rediscovery movement started in the 70s of one of the most relevant figures in photojournalism and offers us an integrative and multifaceted vision of the author based on the examination of her career, the contextualization of the his work in its various facets, geographies and periods and the confrontation with the work of Weston or other photographers and photojournalists.

Despite having always lived in the center of the hurricane of his time (Mexico fresh out of the Revolution, Germany in the throes of the Weimar Republic, Stalin's Soviet Union and Spain during the Civil War) the perfect conjunction between art, ideology and life occurred in Mexico, where Modotti developed the most important part of his career. Not only that, she is one of the artists who forged the international image of post-revolutionary Mexico through her collaborations in magazines such as El Machete , Mexican Folkways , AIZ or New Masses . An imaginary in which other creators of the so-called Mexican cultural renaissance participated, who shared friendship and political commitment with Modotti: the muralists Rivera, Siqueiros and Orozco, the painter Frida Kahlo, the engraver Leopoldo Méndez and the photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo.