Urban visions of two women
Fundación Mapfre reviews the work of two photographers with their own character, Ilse Bing and Anastasia Samoylova.
Until 14 May, two simultaneous exhibitions can be visited at the KBr space of the Fundació Mapfre. They are Ilse Bing, curated by Juan Vicente Aliaga, and Image Cities, by Anastasia Samoylova, curated by Victoria del Val. Ilse Bing is the first exhibition in Spain to present the entire career of this author, while Image Cities is the winning entry of the first edition of the KBr Photo Award.
The long career of Ilse Bing (Frankfurt, 1899 - New York, 1998) reflects the major cultural trends and historical vicissitudes of the 20th century. The daughter of a Jewish family, she went into exile in the United States. Her work is marked by the cities in which she lived: the Frankfurt of the Bauhaus, the Paris of the 1930s and post-war New York. Her photographs are influenced by Moholy-Nagy's Das Neue Sehen [The New Vision], by André Kertész and by the surrealism of Man Ray, but the aesthetic proposals of successive artistic movements and styles are combined with a personal view marked by humanism and social awareness. Through her modernity and innovation, Ilse Bing achieved a projection and recognition from which women had hitherto been excluded.
The Image Cities project by Russian-American photographer Anastasia Samoylova (Moscow, 1984) began in Russia and New York in 2021, and has been extended to other cities such as Amsterdam, Paris, London, Brussels, Tokyo, Madrid and Barcelona thanks to the KBr Photo Award. The author travels through cities and photographs the monumental advertisements of major brands and companies that proliferate on facades, buses and, in general, on the multitude of urban advertising media. These are billboards that can be found in any metropolis and which are gradually losing their idiosyncrasy in favour of increasingly bland global images. As a result, the world's major cities are moving towards a generic urban landscape, with no identity or distinctive urban features.
The combined ticket for both exhibitions costs 9 euros, or 5 euros if you only want to visit one of them. You can make your reservations at this link.