Cualladó Chronicles: Unveiling the Archive and Latest Works

This exhibition, focused on Gabriel Cualladó (Massanassa, Valencia, 1925–Madrid, 2003), is grounded in thorough research of the works of this artist found in the IVAM Collection (approximately 445 photographs) as one of the essential foundations of the museum’s collection. Curated by Sandra Moros, the exhibit presents a selection of projects and reports that Cualladó created from the late 1950s to the 1990s, with a portion of the photographer’s archive and library being included for the first time.

Cualladó: Archive/Work seeks to explore Cualladó’s world from its beginnings, highlighting his contributions as a photographer, as well as a collector, writer, and editor. His archive (comprising photomontages, correspondence, polaroids, brochures, invitations, and numerous other documents) along with his remarkable library, unparalleled in Spain, enables us to not only reconstruct his artistic endeavors but also the history and evolution of photography in Spain, framed within an international perspective. His material and artistic bequest allows us to trace Cualladó’s journey from amateur associations to the formal acknowledgment of photography as an art form, for which he was honored with the inaugural National Photography Prize in 1994.

The exhibition features documents and previously unseen material that unveil a different facet of the artist, and also showcases part of his expansive photography collection, which resides at the IVAM, featuring artists such as Diane Arbus, August Sander, and Dorothea Lange. Compiled by him spontaneously through acquisitions and exchanges with other photographers, incorporating his collection within this exhibition fosters a dialogue between his work and that of different photographers, while weaving a narrative of artists, elements, images, and shared and multifaceted visual resources that traverse his practice as an artist and collector.

Accompanying the exhibition is a comprehensive book published by IVAM that includes texts by the curator as well as contributions from experts such as Jorge Ribalta, National Photography Award 2024.