The show Saudades de Sao Paulo. Photographs by Palmira Puig and Marcel Giró is a tribute to the photographic output of Palmira Puig (Tàrrega, 1912 – Barcelona, 1978) and Marcel Giró (Badalona, 1913 – Mira-sol, 2011) as well as a record of the lifetime of an extraordinary couple.

Curated by Rocío Santa Cruz, the exhibition brings together some sixty works by the two photographers, who went into exile in Brazil and played a central role in Brazilian avant-garde photography.  Many of Marcel Giró’s early photographs, dating from the 1930s, were taken in the Catalan Pyrenees and already displayed a marked tendency towards abstraction, a common feature in all his later work.  For her part, Palmira Puig’s work is based on, as in the case of Giró, the experimentation and formal audacity witnessed in her black and white pictures.  The larger part of her output is characterised by the poesy and elegance of her still lifes, landscapes and portraits.

Some of the photographs appearing in this exhibition have recently become part of the collections of international institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York), the MASP (São Paulo Museum of Art), the MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo), Itaú Cultural (São Paulo), and the MNAC (Catalan National Museum of Art), as well as of notable private collections.

As well as photographs signed and attributed to the two artists, this exhibition also includes portraits they took of each other, as well as photos by the two of them with the same camera and appearing on the same reels of film.  Authorship cannot be ascribed with complete certainty to these, adding a sense of mystery to this exceptional husband-and-wife artistic tandem.

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