Anna Malagrida: "Crises affect cities as if they were a body."

BarcelonaCreators who leave and consolidate their careers abroad often have to pay the price of receiving little attention in Catalonia. After an early exhibition at the Metrònom gallery, the Senda gallery has been the thread that has maintained the connection between photographer Anna Malagrida (Barcelona, ​​1970), who has lived in Paris for nearly twenty-five years, and her hometown for years. Until this Thursday, the Museu Tàpies does her justice by dedicating the first exhibition in a Barcelona museum to her, entitled Anna Malagrida. Opacitas. Ensuring Transparency. "When Imma [Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies] suggested this exhibition to me, I was very excited," says Anna Malagrida.

So, does it make sense to wonder whether Malagrida is more of a French artist than a Catalan artist, or a Catalan artist from Paris? "I've always thought that being different is a very good thing," says the artist, best known for a series in which she has documented, like micro-stories, the impact of the recent economic crises on the shop windows of Paris. "It's true that perhaps there has been little recognition here, but it's also true that the fact that I left and succeeded there has helped me to make people consider doing it here too; it's a human thing," says Malagrida.

"In France, being an artist or an intellectual exists in a much more integrated way in an ecosystem where someone who says different things is listened to more, is of greater interest; and not just in a small world like the art world. People are more interested in culture because it is a space for conversation, for social interaction, and it is part of the artist," and it is part of the artist. "As in the case of Marta Palau"We work to reconstruct the gaps that a certain history has left in the present," says Patrícia Sorroche, head of exhibitions at the Museu Tàpies and curator of the exhibition. "What we were very interested in was not only recovering historical figures, but also giving space and visibility to artists who have had to work from outside," says Sorroche.

Malagrida's arrival at the Tàpies Museum has radically transformed the museum's basement galleries. The first part, dedicated to the series Shop windows (2008-2009), with a string of unpublished works, successfully evokes a street in Spain lined with white-painted shop windows because the businesses they housed closed due to bankruptcy. "Crises affect cities as if they were a body," says Malagrida. "I've always worked indirectly: while documentary photography shows the scream, or what is said, marks speak more subtly of the tensions of the moment and how they surface in the skin of the collective space." On the other hand, the opacity of the white-painted shop windows, referred to in the exhibition's title, becomes "a field of possibilities." Graffiti can be seen in many of the shop windows. One of them is terribly premonitory, depicting a shape reminiscent of a pistol: "Le Pen vites".

Archaeology of the disappeared Club Med of Cap de Creus

In the remaining rooms, there's a reversal: instead of looking from the outside in, in the other works on display, the gaze goes from the inside out. Everything corresponds to how Malagrida delves into the images, into the correspondences between painting and photography, into all the layers an image can have, and how the gaze activates them and reveals thought. Thus, you can see two works Malagrida created at the Club Med in Cap de Creus before it was demolished. "It's the chronicle of a death foretold," says Malagrida. And a video, Women's dance, made in Jordan, with which, in the midst of the debate over the wearing of the veil in France, Malagrida filmed an interior that is only visible through the curtain covering the window. "Ideas, when I have them, always come from very small details," says Malagrida.

The exhibition, which will remain open until September 28, ends with a short video showing the window cleaner at Malagrida's Parisian gallery in action, in a combination of abstract painting (glass soap), photography, and everyday life. "I liked being able to look at the gesture from the other side, and, on the other hand, it's a somewhat political piece: I am an artist and he is a worker. I am in the gallery and he is outside, and I am interested in giving it importance and making visible a work that is the work of the invisible," says the artist.