Zanele Muholi (Umlazi, South Africa, 1972) is an artist and visual activist, and one of today’s most universally acclaimed photographers. They define themself as non-binary and use the pronouns they/them/theirs. Addressing issues of race, gender and sexuality, their work in photography, video and installation has been exhibited worldwide. This show, co-produced with Tate Modern and presenting around 260 photographs, is the largest so far in their career.

For over twenty years, Muholi has been making photographs that document and celebrate the lives of black, lesbian, gay, trans, queer and intersex communities in South Africa. In their early series, called Only Half the Picture, Muholi captured moments of love and intimacy, but also images that speak of traumatic events, because, despite the promise of equality enshrined in the 1968 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, the country’s LGTBIQA+ communities are still the object of violence. In Faces and Phases each subject looks directly at the camera, challenging the beholder to maintain their gaze. These images, coupled with first-hand testimonies, create an archive of a community of people who put their lives at risk to stand up to discrimination. Another key series in their body of work is Brave Beauties, based on the empowerment of trans women, gender non-conforming and non-binary people. In the series Somnyama Ngonyama, Muholi turns the camera on themself to offer powerful and reflexive images that explore themes of labour, racism, Eurocentrism and sexual politics.

Zanele Muholi received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography and a Chevalier de Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2016 and an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 2018.

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This exhibition is dedicated to the work of Anni and Josef Albers, exploring the various lines of artistic production of these two towering artists and pioneers of twentieth-century modernism. While they developed their respective work independently, the intimate, empathetic bond between them underpinned a lifetime of mutual support and encouragement and an ongoing dialogue founded on shared respect.

Anni and Josef Albers met in 1922 at the Bauhaus and married three years later. Throughout their lives and artistic practices, they shared the conviction that art could profoundly transform our world and should be at the very heart of human existence.

In addition to its comprehensive presentation of their respective oeuvres, this is the first exhibition in Spain dedicated to the two artists as a couple throughout the different phases of their creative production. The exhibition follows a chronological order and comprises around 350 works—paintings, photographs, designs and textiles, films, documentary material, as well as a selection of furniture from their time at Bauhaus—that mark some of the many highlights in the career of the couple of artists.

This is the first monographic exhibition by Anna Boghiguian (Cairo, 1946) in Spain. In her work, the Egyptian-Canadian artist of Armenian origin explores the historical, economic, social and political impact of certain events of the past in the present. Boghiguian employs the image as a form of writing and writing as image to unfold a way of thinking and a poetics committed with the world; visual essays that show the sustained impact of political history and economic conditions in the contemporary world.

To the artist’s way of thinking, colonialism is like a hinge moment that ushered in a profound radical change in articulating human relationships with the world, however much her images are drawn from her experience, from the personal encounter with certain places and objects that provoke an emotional and cognitive response. Boghiguian transforms these experiences into artist books, drawings, paintings, cut-outs, collages and installations.

Widely considered one of the most interesting contemporary artists of our time, Boghiguian has had solo shows at SMAK, Ghent (2020); Tate St. Ives, (2019); New Museum, New York (2018); Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2017); Carré d’Art, Nîmes (2016). Her work has been seen at documenta 13 in Kassel and in the biennials of Sharja (2011), Sao Paulo (2014), Istanbul (2015), Santa Fe (2016) and Sydney (2020). She received, together with other Armenian artists, the Golden Lion for her contribution to the Armenian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015).

The core idea behind Endgame is to survey the painterly grammar of Jordi Teixidor (Valencia, 1941) in the field of abstraction over the course of the last six decades. The show includes early works from his beginnings as a painter within the orbit of the avant-garde art groups Nueva Generación and Antes del Arte, as well as a select number of paintings from the most notable series in his longstanding career set in dialogue with works from the IVAM collection.

In this regard, the exhibition pays special attention to Teixidor’s more recent and previously unseen output while also tracing some of the sources of inspiration behind his experimentation in the field of abstract painting through the inclusion of works by Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt or Juan van der Hamen.

Endgame is rounded off with a series of little-known working material from the artist’s personal archive: notepads and sketch books, polaroids, plans and charts evincing the complex methods employed by Teixidor to carry out his paintings and the numerous exhibitions of his work over the years. Teixidor obsessively explores the very physicity of painting itself, the limits of space and the vibrant tension between geometry and gesturality.