Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro Barro (A Coruña, 1970) was appointed artistic director of the Museum of the University of Navarre (MUN)center with which he has collaborated for six years as an associate professor of the Master of Curator Studies. “From the first day of classes, I knew that I wanted to be part of this project. The MUN has a unique characteristic, that of being a university museum in Spain.and we must take advantage of its enormous potential to connect the academic and artistic spheres in a research and creation laboratory“explains Perez-Barreiro.
So, The MUN management team is renewed and completedwhich has Teresa Lasheras as artistic director of performing arts and music, Jaime García del Barrio as general director, José Manuel Trillo as deputy general director and Elisa Montserrat as director of communication and marketing.
Their The predecessors in office are Valentin Vallhonrat and Rafael Levenfeldwho for almost forty years have preserved and expanded the MUN Collectionwhose origins date back to the photographic legacy of Ortiz Echagüe and which today has more than 25,000 works, with national and international authors from the beginnings of photography to the present day, in all artistic disciplines. Vallhonrat will remain linked to the MUN as deputy general director.
Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, graduate and doctor in art history A graduate of the universities of Aberdeen and Essex respectively – both in the United Kingdom – he is an expert in Latin American art.
Collect more than 30 years of professional experience in the art sector as a curator, cultural manager, professor, researcher, writer and lecturer, in museums and institutions in Europe, the United States and Latin America, where he combined the exercise of his profession with government functions.
They highlight their contributions as director and chief curator in the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection; Director of Visual Arts at the Americas Society in New York; Founding Curator of the Essex Collection of Art From Latin American Art at the University of Essex; Curator of Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Austin; and as Coordinator of Exhibitions, Publications, and Public Programs at Casa de América, Madrid. He has served as Chief Curator of the 33rd Sao Paulo Biennale, the 6th Mercosul, and the Brazilian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale.
Pérez-Barreiro will combine his new position with other honorary titles and consulting at MoMA (New York, USA), the Essex Collection of Latin American Art (Colchester, UK) and the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection Foundation (New York, Caracas, Madrid).
So far, has organized more than 40 exhibitionswith a special focus on geometric abstraction and Latin American contemporary art, as well as the exhibition of permanent collections. Always accompany exhibitions with innovative mediation strategies with the public. “I consider curating as something akin to translation,” comments the new director of the MUN; “art has its codes and references, which are not necessarily familiar to everyone. Our job is to try to create the conditions for it to flow.” the communication between the work and the viewer.
In Spain it is Curatorship in two exhibitions at the Reina Sofía National Art Center Museum: ‘L’Invention Concrète’, organized with Manuel Borja-Villel in 2013 and recognized as the best exhibition by the Institute of Contemporary Art of Madrid; and ‘Mário Pedrosa. On the affective nature of form’, with Michelle Sommer, awarded by the Association of Art Critics of Brazil in 2017.
At the international level, the most acclaimed samples were “Radical Geometry,” with Adrian Locke, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2014; and “The Geometry of Hope: Latin American Abstract Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection,” a production for the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas that toured to New York University’s Grey Art Gallery in 2007 and was awarded the best thematic exhibition of the year by the prestigious International Association of Art Critics (AICA) in the United States.
Fruit of his research work, He is a regular speaker and editor of over 60 publications. In addition to the themes on which his curatorial work focuses, he also studies, disseminates and publishes on mediation, education, collecting strategies and cultural policies around Latin American art in a global context.
He new artistic director considers that “all institutional work is a collective task; to lead is to be able to value this human talent and to seek a common mission in the service of the community that the Museum serves.”
MUN will celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2025 “and this with a long list of successes – underlines the new artistic director -; my idea is to build on these foundations, but with emphasis on the museum-university dialogue, the public and the Ibero-American context. take advantage of my first hundred days to detect talents, opportunities and new challenges”.
