LOEWE FOUNDATION Brings Talia Chetrit's Unflinching Lens to Madrid

Art & Lifestyle

As PHotoESPAÑA returns to Madrid this summer, LOEWE FOUNDATION marks its fifteenth year supporting the renowned photography festival with Bunny, a major solo exhibition by American artist Talia Chetrit.

Opening on 5 June at the Museo Lázaro Galdiano, the exhibition is the New York-based photographer's first institutional solo presentation in Spain.

Born in Washington in 1982, Chetrit has built a reputation for photographs that are at once intimate, provocative and disarming. Curated by Stella Bottai, Bunny brings together almost three decades of image-making, tracing the artist's longstanding examination of photography as both medium and subject. The exhibition's title hints at the contradictions that characterise her work: playful yet confrontational, tender yet unsettling, humorous yet deeply personal.

Across the exhibition, Chetrit moves fluidly between self-portraiture, family documentation, still life imagery and close studies of the body. The result is a body of work that resists easy categorisation, instead inviting viewers into a carefully choreographed visual language where innocence, sexuality and vulnerability coexist. Perspectives shift constantly, with photographs alternating between intimacy and detachment, proximity and distance.

Scale also plays a significant role. Small, quietly observed works such as Boob Chair (Lygia Pape) (2021) sit alongside monumental enlargements including Ella/Plastic Bottle (2026), creating a dynamic dialogue across the galleries. Yet despite the diversity of subject matter, Chetrit's enduring commitment to analogue photography creates a striking cohesion throughout the exhibition.

That consistency allows works made decades apart to enter into conversation with one another. Images captured during Chetrit's teenage years appear alongside photographs exhibited publicly for the first time, collapsing time and generating new meanings through juxtaposition. Recurring motifs, chains, breasts, bottles and bellies echo throughout the exhibition, while themes of family, sexuality and selfhood are revisited from new spatial and temporal perspectives.

Questions of care, dependence and identity emerge particularly strongly in works such as Milk on Back (2020) and Untitled (Family no. 1). Here, motherhood is presented not as a fixed role but as an expansive condition in which artist, subject and parent overlap. Through self-staging and observation, Chetrit challenges conventional narratives around personhood and familial relationships.

The exhibition arrives within the framework of PHotoESPAÑA 2026's curatorial theme, "Reimagining", which explores the ways photography can challenge accepted realities and established forms of authority. The festival's focus on the relationship between fashion photography and the creative avant-garde also resonates strongly with Chetrit's practice. Alongside her artistic work, the photographer is known for her fashion commissions, including campaigns created for LOEWE, while works such as Untitled (Model) (2024) demonstrate the ongoing dialogue between her commercial and artistic output.

Bunny follows LOEWE FOUNDATION's recent PHotoESPAÑA presentations, including last year's exhibition dedicated to Dora Maar and the foundation's 2024 programme celebrating the centenary of Surrealism. As the partnership reaches its fifteenth year, Chetrit's exhibition offers a fitting continuation of the foundation's commitment to supporting artists who challenge photography's conventions while expanding its possibilities.

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