PHotoEspaña: Festival Off

Alongside PHotoEspaña runs Festival Off, fringe exhibitions in little galleries and public spaces all over the city, which are separate from the official festival's theme.

As part of Festival Off, my two favourite neighbourhood galleries, just a skip from my apartment, are each holding very different exhibitions of their own.

 

 

Galería Fernando Pradilla, which I wrote about here, is hosting Spain's first exhibition of the work of the Venezuelan Suwon Lee.

 

Her photographs in The Darkness of Light use huge exposure times to capture the stars and the Northern Lights in ways that are invisible to the human eye.

 

 

Her photographs don't look like photographs at all, they're like surreal paintings. The occasional presence of a tiny human shadow just emphasises the vastness of the sky.

 



A few doors down the street, Galería Patricia Acal, which I last wrote about here, is exhibiting David Leventi's beautiful photographs of the world's opera houses.

 

David Leventi, La Fenice, Venezia. Italy

From a family of architects, Leventi says in the exhibition's blurb that he has an almost religious feeling when entering magnificent buildings like these.

 

His photographs have such depth that they bring out every detail of the rich interiors, his aim being to create perfect symmetry. The scenes would be impossible for the naked eye to take in all at once, but the camera brings everything into focus in a single frame. The effect is like being surrounded by space and potential energy.

 

David Leventi, Palais Garnier, Paris. France



David Leventi, Curtain, Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm. Sweden

PHotoEspaña and Festival Off are running throughout the summer at venues all over the city.  Look out for the yellow PHE13 signs on gallery windows and pubic buildings and you'll know you're in the right place.

 

The Darkness of Light until 13 July 2013

Opera until 4 July 2013

http://www.phe.es/

http://galeriafernandopradilla.com/galeria/

http://www.galeriapatriciaacal.com/GALERIA_PATRICIA_ACAL.html

 

PHotoEspaña 2013

PHotoEspaña, Madrid's International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts, is one of the world's most important arts festivals.  The city's museums, galleries and public buildings play host to exhibitions by photographers and artists from all over the world, with each year centred around a different theme.

2013's theme is Cuerpo. Eros y Políticas ('The Body. Eros and Politics').

There are 74 exhibitions involving 328 artists from 42 countries.  One of the festival's main exhibition sites is the beautiful 1920s Círculo de Bellas Artes.  I dropped in after work one evening to see one of the headline exhibitions, Mujer ('Woman').

Subtitled The Feminist Avant-Garde from the 1970s, the exhibition showcased 21 artists from the Sammlung Verbund collection in Vienna, which focusses on the feminist art movement in the 1970s.

The works are predominately centred around ideas of identity: women depicting their own bodies through their own eyes, rather than as a man's idealised image of a woman.

Ana Mendieta. Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints), 1972/1997

Also in the CBA was He, She, It. Dialogues between Edward Weston and Harry Callahan, which took the two great American photographers' works and placed them side by side.

Both Weston and Callahan famously depicted nudes and eroticism.  The aim of the exhibition was to show that in many cases it was not their nudes that were erotic, often being very soft and affectionate, but their photographs of other subjects, which became erotic by suggestion and association.

Edward Weston, Floating Nude, 1939

Edward Weston, Nude, 1934

Another major location for the festival is Madrid's luscious botanical garden (a little photo essay of which I made here).

Hidden away at the back of the gardens, through a vine-covered walkway, are two exhibitions.  The first, Savoir c'est pouvoir ('Knowledge is Power'), focusses on the body as an ideological tool or political object.

These images are less about photography itself as an art, but more about delivering an unambiguous political message.

Manuela Marques, Sin título (Puños) / Untitled (Fists), 1999

The second exhibition was my far-out favourite.  El cuerpo revelado ('The Body Revealed') is a series of different photographers' work from the Alcobendas Collection of Spanish art.

Juan Manuel Castro Prieto, 1993

The hugely varied images all touched upon the body as an individual, personal creation: the product of culture and society.  Not all were explicitly about the nude human form; my favourite series were Luis Baylón's affectionate and witty black and white portraits of ordinary people in Madrid, which are worth the trip alone.

Luis Baylón, Freud, 1990

Woman until 1 September 2013, all other exhibitions until 28 July 2013.

http://www.phe.es/

http://www.circulobellasartes.com/index2.php

http://www.rjb.csic.es/jardinbotanico/jardin/