Crueldad

This catalogue of the new exhibition at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, entitled Cruelty, brings together a selection of Chema Madoz's most disturbing images, some of them unknown. The "disturbing", that strangeness which, according to Freud, haunts the everyday or the domestic, is manifested in the objects immortalised by this genius of Spanish photography, which are altered and mixed without violence, which seem to belong to a world that is both close and unreal at the same time. The curators of the exhibition, Juan Barja and Patxi Lanceros, analyse in an essay the relationship of his powerful images with the inhospitable, the sinister and the cruel in a dreamlike and psychoanalytical key.

Chema Madoz (Madrid, 1958), winner of the National Photography Prize (2000) and the PHotoESPAÑA Prize (2000), among others, is a key figure in the history of Spanish photography. He is the first living Spanish photographer to whom the Reina Sofía Museum dedicated a retrospective. He has exhibited at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, the Joan Miró Foundation and the Canal de Isabel II, and in museums, galleries and international art fairs such as FotoFest (Houston) and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. His work forms part of the collections of the Telefónica Foundation, the Andalusian Centre of Photography, the Juan March Foundation, the IVAM, the Ministry of Culture and the Fine Arts Museum of Houston, among others.

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