Ten Contemporary Spanish Photographers

“Intergenerational Transitions”

“Itinerarios Afines”

The exhibition is being held in collaboration with the Spanish Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Culture and the Spanish Embassy in Ankara, organized by the Cervantes Institute and SEACEX, and coordinated by the Millî Reasürans Art Gallery

The exhibition, organized at the Millî Reasürans Art Gallery and consisting of the works of ten contemporary Spanish photographers, offers the audience a cross-section of Spanish photography and different combination possibilities.

Within the framework of this exhibition, curator Oliva Maria Rubio brings together artists from the 1950s generation, who are well-known in their country, some of whom have achieved significant success abroad, and all of whom have solid careers, and those chosen from the younger generation of artists born in the 1960s who are now taking part in the international art scene.

During the strong change in Spanish photography in the 1950s and 1960s, a national brand was created and international success was achieved with the generation of documentary photographers, such as Joan Colom, Francesc Catala-Roca, Xavier Miserachs, Oriol Maspons, Ramon Masats, whose works were mostly published in the magazine Agrupacion Fotografica Almeriense.

The artists who followed this period and are included in this exhibition, including Cristina Garcia Rodero and Chema Madoz, born in the late 1940s and 1950s, Alberto Garcia-Alix, Ferran Freixa, Cristobal Hara, Angel Marcos, Ouka Leele and Javier Vallhonrat, and a new generation of artists such as Xavier Ribas and Maria Bleda & Jose Maria Rosa, born in the 1960s, overcame the concepts that limited photography and found a place for themselves in international events with the richness and expansion created by this artistic discipline.

The artists in the first group work with a poetic, conceptual or pictorial perspective, mostly in the field of documentary and traditional photography. The second group of young artists, who are nourished by both documentary and conceptual works, present these two tendencies together in their works. Care was taken to select as many works as possible that would best introduce these ten photographers in the exhibition. One of the photographers in the exhibition, Cristina Garcia Rodero, won the best photography award in 1989 with her Secret Spain exhibition and book, which she started in 1973 and collected her works on festivals, traditions and rituals in Spain for 15 years. The exhibition and book, which traveled around the world, brought her international recognition. She later worked in the Caribbean Islands of Haiti for five years and collected her works in the Haitian Rituals exhibition and book. This work earned her the National Photography Award. Garcia Rodero, who uses photography as an anthropological and artistic document in various projects, has taken part in many international biennials. The works of Chema Madoz, who is presented as an “unclassifiable artist” in the exhibition, with the assessment that “he is not just a photographer, or a visual poet, or a neo-conceptualist who suddenly emerged, or a leading figure in the international arena”, also attract attention.