Madrid and Barcelona,
About to complete its current exhibitions in Madrid and Barcelona (dedicated, respectively, to Weegee, the artists supported by Peggy Guggenheim and the latest impressionists promoted by Durand-Ruel, and to Cartier-Bresson and the young photographers selected in the KBr Flama call) , the MAPFRE Foundation has advanced its 2025 programming, made up of nine exhibitions that can be seen in both cities.
In Madrid, in its usual vein, this institution will begin the year with proposals focused on the art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as the work of relevant authors in the history of photography from the last century.
On February 6, “1924. Other surrealisms”, an exhibition that will study the reception and influence of the first Surrealist Manifesto, written by André Breton one hundred years ago, and that will be based on the idea that there were multiple interpretations and developments of that movement. Works by René Magritte, Salvador Dalí and Óscar Domínguez will be brought together, but also by lesser-known artists, such as Nicolás de Lekuona, Amparo Segarra and José Alemany, who developed outside the dominant discourse from Spain and Latin America, and by some women, such as Remedios Varo and Maruja Mallo.
Estrella de Diego will be the curator of this collective, which will be part of the international celebration of the centenary of the publication of said Manifesto; With partially different speeches, it has already passed through the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts in Belgium and the Center Pompidou in Paris and, after its presentation in Madrid, it will travel to the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
On the same day, the “Sakiko Nomura” Foundation will be inaugurated in the capital. Tender is the night”, an extensive retrospective of this Japanese photographer, known above all for her male nudes, almost always in black and white, wrapped in nocturnal atmospheres, enigmatic and full of shadows, with visible grain or out of focus. Likewise, he has dedicated images to animals, still lifes, city views, hotel room interiors, atmospheric phenomena or moving lights and reflections, sometimes evoking features of cinema. Enrique Juncosa will be responsible for the exhibition tour.
In the month of February the season will also start at the KBr Photography Center in Barcelona, with the exhibitions “José Guerrero. About the landscape” and “Felipe Romero. Bravo”.
The first will offer a comprehensive examination – by Marta Gili – of the author’s work over the last two decades, dedicated to the representation and reception of landscape and architecture through photography. This artist from Granada articulates his production in series that he develops on places with a high iconographic load (La Mancha, Carrara, Sierra Nevada, the Thames…) and in which the landscape is examined as an active entity and with a living and dynamic identity, in which cultures and the predisposition of the collective imagination intertwine. Some of the images on display have been part of the MAPFRE Foundation Collections since 2013.
As for Felipe Romero, born in Bogotá in 1992, he was the winner of the second edition of the KBr Photo Award. His work explores territories that have been or are the scene of tension, conflict or visual reflection and the project “Bravo” focuses on the stretch of the river of the same name that serves as the border between Mexico and the United States, specifically in a territory close to Monterrey, in the Mexican area, in which the flow and flows of migrants who arrive to cross it shape the identity of its people and their ways of life.
These two exhibitions can be visited between February 15 and May 18, 2025 in Barcelona, and from June 5 to August 24, 2025, in the Sala Recoletos in Madrid.
Already in summer, from June 12 to August 31, the KBr photography center in the Catalan capital will host exhibitions on Edward Weston and Joan Andreu Puig Farran. The first of them will later travel to Madrid, between September 2025 and January 2026.
Weston’s exhibition is planned as an anthology that will review the different stages of the photographic collection of the American artist, a pioneer in the use of a modernist style and whose work is characterized by the use of a large format camera that allows him to create white images. and black very detailed and sharp. Co-founder of the f/64 Group, his snapshots were vital to understanding the new aesthetics and American lifestyle born in the United States between the wars.
For its part, “Joan Andreu Puig Farran: the turbulent decade (1929-1939)” will be the first exhibition that delves into the legacy of this photographer from Ilerda, born in 1904 and died in Barcelona in 1982. Photojournalist in newspapers such as La Humanitat, Esplai, El Matí, L’Opinió either The VanguardAfter the outbreak of the Civil War, he traveled through the different battle fronts in Aragon and Mallorca; He then went into exile in France, where he passed through some internment camps. The exhibition will be made up of original copies from the archive of The Vanguardcopies made for this project from the glass plates kept by the artist’s family and a series of diaries of the time in which his images were published.
Finally, the exhibition year will end in Madrid with the aforementioned retrospective of Weston and another of the painter Raimundo de Madrazo, both open between September 18 and January 18, 2026.
Belonging to one of the most famous families of artists in our country, Raimundo de Madrazo was a great genre painter and portraitist of high society at the end of the 19th century. This anthology, the first provided to him, will pay attention to his context in terms of the art market, the history of collecting, and modern society in turn-of-the-century Paris, where he lived for much of his career. He knew the workings of the Second Empire, remained distant from the official taste and produced a painting that achieved high prices in the international art market, given that a then-thriving bourgeoisie appreciated in his genre scenes the value of the precious capture of its interiors and its virtues as a colorist. In spring 2026, this project will arrive at the Meadows Museum in Dallas.
As for Barcelona, the year will close there with an exhibition dedicated to Helen Levitt, and a new edition of KBr Flama’25; Both can be seen between September 23 and January 25, 2026.
At just eighteen years old, Levitt began exploring his hometown of New York with a handheld camera. Since then, the main theme of his photography was the spontaneity of everyday life, and his production was extensive and diverse, although often starring children from working-class neighborhoods, the axis of scenes full of vitality. This will be the first exhibition to be prepared from the study of all its archives.
