Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, new artistic director of the MUN, will promote dialogue between the museum and the university, mediation with the public and Ibero-American art.
The appointment comes after six years of his collaboration as a teacher in the Master's Degree in Curatorial Studies offered by Museo Universidad de Navarra (MUN). With extensive experience in university museums and other centers in Europe, the United States and Latin America, he is now the new head of the artistic strategy of the MUN together with Teresa Lasheras, artistic director of performing arts and music.
FotoManuelCastells/Museo Universidad de Navarra/Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, new artistic director of MUN
Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro Barro (A Coruña, 1970) has been appointed artistic director of Museo Universidad de Navarra (MUN), a center with which he has been collaborating for six years as associate professor of the Master's Degree in Curatorial Studies. "From the first day of class, I knew I wanted to be part of this project. The MUN has a unique characteristic, that of being a university museum in Spain, and we have to take advantage of its enormous potential to connect the academic and artistic spheres in a laboratory of research and creation," explains Pérez-Barreiro.
The MUN's management team is thus renewed and completed, with Teresa Lasheras as artistic director of performing arts and music, Jaime García del Barrio as general director, José Manuel Trillo as deputy managing director and Elisa Montserrat as director of communication and marketing. Their predecessors in the position are Valentín Vallhonrat and Rafael Levenfeld (+), who over the last forty years have conserved and expanded the MUN Collection, whose origins go back to the photographic legacy of Ortiz Echagüe and which today has more than 25,000 works, with national and international authors from the beginning of photography to the present day, in all artistic disciplines. Vallhonrat will continue to be linked to the MUN as assistant to the general director.
Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, a graduate and PhD in Art History from the universities of Aberdeen and Essex respectively -both in the United Kingdom-, is an expert in Latin American art.
He has more than 30 years of professional experience in the art sector as a curator, cultural manager, teacher, researcher, writer and lecturer, in museums and institutions in Europe, the United States and Latin America, where he has combined his profession with government positions.
His contributions as director and chief curator of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, director of visual arts at the Americas Society in New York; curator-founder 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 museum of the University of Texas at Austin; and as coordinator of exhibitions, publications and public programs at Casa de América, in Madrid, stand out. He has been chief curator of the 33rd Sao Paulo Biennial, the 6th Mercosul Biennial and the Brazilian pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennial.
Pérez-Barreiro will combine his new position with other honorary and advisory positions at MoMA (New York, United States), the Essex Collection of Latin American Art (Colchester, United Kingdom) and the Fundación Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (New York, Caracas, Madrid).
To date, he has curated more than 40 exhibitions, with a special focus on geometric abstraction and Latin American contemporary art, and on the exhibition of permanent collections. He always accompanies the exhibitions with innovative strategies of mediation with the public.I think of curatorship as something akin to translation," says MUN's new director; "art has its codes and references, which are not necessarily familiar to everyone. Our job is to try to create the conditions for communication to flow between the work and the viewer".
In Spain, his curatorial work stands out in two exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía: "La invención concreta", curated together with Manuel Borja-Villel in 2013 and recognized as best exhibition by the Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo de Madrid; and "Mário Pedrosa. Of the affective nature of form", with Michelle Sommer, which was awarded by the Brazilian Art Critics Association in 2017.
Internationally, the most acclaimed shows 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 at the Grey Art Gallery at New York University in 2007 and was awarded Best Thematic Exhibition of the Year by the prestigious International Art Critics Association (AICA) in the United States.
As a result of his research work, he is a regular lecturer and editor of more than 60 publications. In addition to his curatorial work, he also studies, disseminates and publishes on mediation, education, collecting strategies and cultural policies related to Latin American art in a global context.
The new artistic director believes that "all institutional work is a collective endeavor; to direct is to be able to empower that human talent and seek a common mission at the service of the community that the Museum serves".
The MUN will celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2025 "and it does so with a long list of successes," says the new artistic director; " my idea is to build on these foundations, but with an emphasis on museum-university dialogue, audiences and the Ibero-American context. I plan to take advantage of my first hundred days to identify talent, opportunities and new challenges.