"Manuel Alvarez Bravo, a pioneer of art photography in Mexico, is a cornerstone of Mexican culture and twentieth-century Latin-American photography. His work ranges from late 1920 to the 90s. Alvarez Bravo's artistic identity is inextricably linked to the history of his country and the creation of Mexican identity after the revolution of 1910. Thus, his work can be understood both as a reflection of the extraordinary variety of cultures in Mexico as an eccentric drift of surreal avante-garde. The exhibition organised by Fundacion MAPFRE and the accompanying catalogue, runs through 150 photographs, a limited number of iconographic motifs of his work: reflections and illusions of the big city, bodies lying converted into shapes, objects of ambiguous meanings, a wide panoramic that shows his rejection to easy picturesque, his irony insistently ambiguous, and his ability to convert images into symbols beyond the poetic realism typical of Mexican culture. Another key element in his photography is the time, and thus, the exhibition explores the relationship between his language and in photography and experimental film stills of the sixties. Finally, the exhibition shows a selection of late colour photographs and polaroids confirming Alvarez Bravo as an artist working against the grain of established cliches, while having a defining influence on Mexican and Latin-American photography."--bokus.com.
"While not denying the links with Surrealism and the clichés relating to Mexican culture, the selection of 150 photographs is designed to bring out a specific set of iconographic themes running through Álvarez Bravo's practice: reflections and trompe-l'œil effects in the big city; prone bodies reduced to simple masses; volumes of fabric affording glimpses of bodies; minimalist, geometrically harmonious settings; ambiguous objects, etc. ... these recurring phenomena are like visual syllables repeated all through his œuvre, from the late 1920s to the early 1980s. ... Arguably, Álvarez Bravo's photographs could be viewed as images from a film. The exhibition explores this hypothesis by juxtaposing some of his most famous pictures with short experimental films made in the 1960s, taken from the family archives. The show also features some late, highly cinematic images, and a selection of colour prints and Polaroids. ..."--Jeu de Paume website.
