The Mapfre Foundation Bárbara de Braganza showroom opens on Thursday, May 31st, an exhibition dedicated to Brassaï, a Hungarian photographer who began his career in the interwar period and achieved wide recognition with his personal work.

This is the second retrospective dedicated to the artist in our country since that exhibition organised in the Antoni Tàpies Foundation in 1993. 25 years later, the Mapfre Foundation approaches the work of Brassaï thanks to the collaboration of numerous institutions that have made possible the montage.

He was born in Brasov (in 1899, when it still belonged to Hungary). The European journey of this artist was diverse, and he lived in several cities before moving to France. Also, his education began at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Budapest, but then he quitted his studies to fight in the First World War. At the end of the conflict, he began working as a journalist in Berlin and later in Paris, at which point he turned his career around. In the French capital, he experienced an immediate connection with the surrealist language, and this interest led him to collaborate with Dalí, Picasso, Giacometti and Matisse, among others. The result of the creative alliance with Dalí is the collection of images "Involuntary sculptures", with which he began his personal path within photography.

Brassaï collected many elements of his day-to-day life and that he integrated into his compositions, often as mosaics or as story-boards with which to deconstruct, reform and interpret reality, something very typical of the artistic current he belonged to. However, his work is difficult to classify. We find the images of the urban graffiti of the Paris of the slums, the exploration of the nightlife, with "unfiltered" portraits of the brothels and the district police stations...

"Whether they like it or not, the painters of modern life are the photographers," said Brassaï in 1949. His fascination with the French capital led him to explore all its corners, to go beyond the magnificent and monumental beauty of the city, to look for the pulse of its busy and vertiginous life at the peak of the artistic movements of the first third of the century. This exhibition covers the broad career of this artist and his versatility in its purest form.

The work of Carmen Baena (Benalúa de Guadix, Granada, 1967) is structured as a poetic investigation into the memory of territory and its material translation into forms, textures, and gestures. Her practice stems from a life experience deeply connected to a specific landscape in southern Spain, understood not only as a geographical space but also as an affective and symbolic sedimentation. In this sense, her pieces can be approached from a perspective centered on direct experience: the landscape not as representation, but as a lived trace that emerges through doing.

Baena activates unique dialogue between historically hierarchical materials. Marble, associated with permanence and monumental tradition, coexists with embroidery, a technique linked to domestic knowledge passed down through generations, historically relegated but here reactivated as a fully-fledged artistic language. This coexistence is not presented as confrontation, but as a field of resonances where the solid and the fragile, the enduring and the tactile, interpenetrate. From a perspective attentive to connections, embodied experience, and knowledge constructed from everyday life, thread becomes a tool for sensitive knowledge.

Color, particularly in her textile works, functions as vibrational energy rather than a purely formal attribute. In contrast to the chromatic restraint of marble, embroidery introduces an open temporality in which intuitive gestures and accidents acquire structural value. Thus, the process becomes a space for listening, where the unexpected does not interrupt the work but rather constitutes it. In Carmen Baena’s practice, creating means allowing the territory—both external and internal—to continue transforming itself.

The Garden Blooms X. 2025. Acrylic and embroidery thread on canvas. 50 x 70 cm.

Your works evoke landscapes, reliefs, and topographies. How does the relationship between physical territory and symbolic or emotional territory articulate itself in your practice?

The physical territory where I was born and spent my early childhood has shaped all my work. I was born in a cave in the Guadix region (Granada), home to the largest complex of troglodyte dwellings in Europe.

The landscape there is full of contrasts: alongside the greens of the vega—fruit trees and poplars—you find the reddish ochres of the eroded hills. And facing the white of Sierra Nevada, the white of snow that still lingers in spring, there are also the greens of the wheat fields and cereal plains. Thanks to erosion and the geological layers that have been exposed over time, the area contains a series of strata that preserve extremely important continental geological records.

For this reason, the area has been designated a UNESCO Global Geopark. I spent a happy, very simple childhood in this environment—living closely connected to nature—and that is the territory that surfaces throughout the symbolism of my work.

Circular Horizons XIV. 2023. Acrylic and embroidery thread on canvas. 72 x 72 cm.

You learned embroidery in a family context, and you draw on the landscapes of your childhood. When did you realise that your immediate world—people, gestures, everyday landscapes—was no longer just a memory, but an active driving force in the construction of your artistic language?

I realised that the universe of my childhood was an active driving force in the construction of my artistic language thanks to a friend, after she visited my cave-house. Through her perspective, she made me aware of what I had been doing intuitively up until that point. This happened more than twenty years ago, and since then—even though I’m aware of it—I continue working.

I like working intuitively, and most of the time I only discover what the landscape has been afterwards. What stays with me is the sensation that inspired the piece once I have finished it.

Sea Breeze III. 2025. Acrylic and embroidery thread on canvas. 60 x 80 cm.

Marble carries historical and symbolic weight linked to monumentality, while embroidery is often associated with traditions that have been overlooked or confined to the domestic sphere. How do you negotiate this clash of cultural status in your work?

For years, marble was the material I was most interested in, and the one I used for most of my sculptural work. It wasn’t until 2007–2008 that I felt the need to incorporate embroidery—a technique I had learned as a teenager.

I began experimenting on paper, using stitching to draw landscapes and trees directly connected to the sculptures I was making at the time, and also working on small scraps of different kinds of paper. I explored the technical and visual possibilities of thread, creating small works in which colour, texture, and the thread’s vibration became the protagonists.

Later, I moved on to larger formats on canvas, where I also incorporated acrylic. These two seemingly contradictory practices—marble and embroidery—have coexisted in my studio and my work without any difficulty. Today, embroidery has completely displaced marble.

Between Heaven and Earth III. 2020. Marble and wood. 25 x 14 x 14 cm.

In your marble pieces, white and gold create an almost meditative atmosphere; in contrast, embroidery and acrylic burst into colour, activating gesture and vibration. Is this a conscious choice, or do the materials reveal their own possible colour to you?

With marble, the choice of white and gold is a conscious decision: I want to convey the spiritual atmosphere of the landscape, and the relationship between human beings and nature. By contrast, the explosion of colour in the thread emerged gradually and more intuitively, and only later did I begin to understand and use the possibilities of this material in a more conscious way.

Whisper Between the Lines XIII. 2023. Acrylic and embroidery thread on canvas. 40 x 60 cm.

To what extent do you plan your work, and how much space do you leave for the unexpected—or even for mistakes?

When it comes to making my work, I don’t like to plan too much. With embroidered pieces, I do tests on small scraps of paper—trying out colour and the stitch I’m going to use—and with that I try to visualise the final result in my mind. This way of working leaves plenty of space for things to happen while I work. It allows me to discover, learn, and make use of the unexpected.

For example, in some pieces, while embroidering, tangles can occur because the thread tension isn’t right or the thread is too loose. At first, those tangles might seem like they could ruin the piece, but when I see them, I realise they’re visually very interesting. So later I have consciously reproduced that effect in other works.