Exhibition 'Pérez Siquier - Kleuren en contrasten van Spanje' in Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography
In the spring of 2023 Huis Marseille will present a retrospective of the work of the Spanish photographer Carlos Pérez Siquier (1930-2021). Pérez Siquier occupies a key role in Spanish photography, first through his neorealist work in black and white and later as a pioneer of colour photography. He was nevertheless seen as an outsider in Spanish photography, as he spent his entire career living and working in his native town of Almería, a peripheral coastal town in the south-east of the Iberian Peninsula. Pérez Siquier’s work not only bears important witness to the development of Spanish photography, but also to the cultural and socio-economic transformation of postwar Spain. The exhibition is organized by Fundación MAPFRE in close collaboration with Huis Marseille.
Carlos Pérez Siquier’s work is strongly characterized by spontaneity, an interest in the human condition, irony, and an awareness of the power of the photographic gaze. His oeuvre shares his amazement about everyday life. The exhibition provides an overview of his most important series, made between 1957 and 2018: from his earliest work in black and white, marked by incisive social critique, to his later series in colour, which show Spain in the postwar years of the Franco regime, a period during which an apparently free, modern consumer society began to emerge. Later series, in which the sharp contrasts of his early years give way to more poetic, introspective work, are also included in the exhibition.
