The Madrid-based Fundación Mapfre, which is known for its photography collection, is opening a space in central Barcelona in October. The new venue, located in the house built by the wealthy Garriga-Nogués family in the late 19th century, will host two photography exhibitions and one major fine art show a year.
“Barcelona has one of the most important photography traditions in Spain; in the 1980s and 1990s it was the point of reference for Spanish photographers,” says Carlos Gollonet, the curator at the non-profit foundation, which is supported by Mapfre global insurance group.
The inaugural exhibition is a post-Impressionist extravaganza. Isabelle Cahn, the chief curator at the Musée d’Orsay, is organising the show, which is due to open on 10 October (until 10 January 2016). In a rare move, the Paris institution is lending several paintings including self-portraits of Van Gogh, Cézanne and Picasso’s Nude Against a Red Background (1906).
A major exhibition of photographs by the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto will follow in February 2016 and an exhibition by the US photojournalist and Magnum photographer, Bruce Davidson, is due to open in May 2016.
Some exhibitions will travel between Barcelona and Madrid, but Pablo Jiménez Burillo, the director general of culture at Mapfre, says he aims to develop a programme “with a little more independence” in Barcelona. There are plans, for example, to present a series of exhibitions on Catalan photographers, such as the Barcelona-born Joan Colom and Humberto Rivas, who was Argentinian but lived in Barcelona for the latter half of his life.
Despite the clear separation, Mapfre’s two Madrid venues and the Barcelona space are due to be united in 2019 with a joint exhibition featuring around 500 photographs from the foundation’s collection.
The institution started collecting mainly documentary style photography in 2007 and now owns around 1,000 works by photographers including Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Walker Evans and Lee Friedlander. Its first acquisition was the complete series of photographs of the Brown sisters begun in 1975 by Nicholas Nixon.
Around €1m a year has been freed up for the exhibition programme in Barcelona by scrapping the major show held in Madrid every summer. The total budget for the new space is around €4m a year. A further €250,000 has been spent preparing the Garriga-Nogués house, which was previously home to the Fundación Francisco Godia.