MORERA. Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Lleida presents a retrospective exhibition dedicated to Palmira Puig Ximénez (Tàrrega, Lleida, 1912 – Barcelona, 1979), one of the leading Catalan photographers in exile. The exhibition, curated by Jesús Navarro and Rocio Santa Cruz, with the collaboration of Toni Ricart, brings together a carefully selected group of photographs and documentary materials that cover her career from the early 1930s. The show also includes photographs by her husband and fellow photographer Marcel Giró, as well as works by other peers from the same Brazilian movement.
Palmira Puig was a Catalan photographer who lived in Brazil, where she became a member of the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante. Beyond her work as an advertising photographer at Estúdio Giró, which she ran together with her husband Marcel Giró, Puig developed a body of work that sought artistic expression through her own visual language.
Palmira Puig (Tàrrega, Lleida, 1912 – Barcelona, 1979)
Palmira Puig, also known in Brazil as Palmira Giró, was born in 1912 in Tàrrega (Lleida), into a family with a strong cultural and intellectual tradition. She studied commercial expertise and, during the Civil War, collaborated with the Generalitat, the Government of Catalonia.
In 1942, she married Marcel Giró (Badalona, 1913 – Mirassol, 2011), and that same year they traveled to Colombia to reunite with him. Shortly afterward, they settled in São Paulo, where they would live for nearly 30 years. In Brazil, Marcel Giró resumed his passion for photography, and in 1953 opened Estúdio Giró. Both became prominent members of what would later be known as the Paulista School. This movement, a pioneer of modern photography in Brazil, was born around the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante in the 1940s. This group began to question pictorialism and incorporated modern aesthetics into Brazilian photography.
Palmira Puig was, in fact, the first woman accepted as a member of the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante in São Paulo in 1956, and she exhibited her photographs alongside Gertrudes Altschul, Menha S. Polacow, Barbara Mors, and Dulce G. Carneiro.
Palmira Puig-Giró’s work is defined by experimentation and boldness in the treatment of black and white. The most significant part of her oeuvre is characterized by poetry and elegance, which permeate her still lifes, landscapes, and portraits.
A constant delicacy envelops her images, where the human figure and its surroundings are framed within the new figurativism that emerged in the Paulista School at the end of the 1950s.
Her work has been included in major international collections. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York included her photographs in the exhibition Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964 (May–September 2021), and her work is also part of the National Photography Collection of the Government of Catalonia and the collections of MORERA. Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Lleida.
MORERA : Palmira Puig : Perspectives revealed
Until 15 February, 2026
MORERA. Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Lleida
Rambla de Ferran, 13, 25007 Lleida, Spain
https://morera.paeria.cat/en/
