Marcel Giró

Marcel Giró (Badalona, 1913 – Sant Cugat del Vallès, 2011)

Marcel Giró‘s work is part of the photographic collective Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB), a benchmark of avant-garde photography in Brazil, characterised by the constant search for new visual languages and the creative fervour of the Brazilian post-war period. RocioSantaCruz works actively with the photographer’s family collection.

Marcel Giró arrived in São Paulo in 1948 and joined the FCCB after a long career as an amateur photographer. His first photographs date from the 1930s and take the landscapes of the Catalan Pyrenees as their main backdrop. They portrayed, above all, details of mountains and lakes, already showing a particular sensitivity towards abstraction, a style that would mark his work. In 1953, Marcel opened the Estúdio Giró photographic studio with his wife Palmira Puig, also an FCCB photographer. Giró then established himself as a professional photographer and began a productive career as a pioneer of advertising photography.

Giró’s work is articulated from a precise and innovative point of view. His photographs show a recurring interest in geometric figures, chiaroscuro and extreme contrasts. With these elements, Giró composes his own aesthetic, a new photographic syntax, where the artist constantly tries, through his eloquent play of light and shadow, to exceed the limits of representation and meaning.

His work has been included in important international collections, such as the MoMa (New York) -which can be seen in the exhibition Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946-1964 from March to June 2021-, Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), Itaú Cultural (São Paulo), Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC, Barcelona), Tate Modern (United Kingdom), among others.

https://www.marcelgiro.com/ 

Selection of exhibitions

• 2020. Fotografia Moderna. Geraldo de Barros, Gertrudes Altschul, Thomaz Farkas, Marcel Giró, Gaspar Gasparian e Paulo Pires. (Sao Paulo, BR)
• 2020. DUPLO OLHAR. Pintura e fotografia modernas brasileiras (Rio de Janeiro, BR)
• 2019. Moderna para Sempre. Fotografia Modernista Brasileira na Coleção Itaú Museo de Arte Contemporáneo. (Santiago, Chile)
• 2019. The Photography Show Presented by AIPAD (Nueva York, US)
• 2018. Photo London, Somerset House, by the hand of Galería Rocío SantaCruz (London, GB)
• 2017.  Paris Photo, by the hand of Galería Rocío SantaCruz (París, FR)

Press
https://cat.elpais.com/cat/2017/04/26/cultura/1493231893_016792.html