Bored Couples

Bored Couples is Martin Parr‘s humorous study of bored couples around Europe, including Spain, Finland, and the UK, during the 80s and 90s.

“This series of photographs were taken as an opportunity to explore the veracity of the caption.
We do not know if these random couples are bored or not. Who is to say what is authentic when captioned as thus?” Magnum Photos

FINLAND. On board a ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm. From 'Bored Couples'. 1991.

SPAIN. Majorca. Bored Couples. 1993.

martin_parr_bored_couples_05 martin_parr_bored_couples_01 bored-couples Martin Parr martinparr_11 Bored Couples MartinParrBoredCouples

Bathers on the Beach

On a Sunny Day…

Bathers, Pablo Picasso, 1920

Bathers, Pablo Picasso, 1920

On a Rainy Day…

Bologna, Luigi Ghirri, 1973

Bologna, Luigi Ghirri, 1973


As Picasso himself said,Good artists copy, great artists steal. So Dalí began his career by “stealing” from Picasso, stimulating the development of his own unique style. Picasso was 23 years Dalí’s senior and was already an established figure in the art world when Dalí was a young aspiring artist. He was a huge admirer of Picasso and sought inspiration from him.

Dalí’s first associations with Picasso were very literal – he boldly stole from Picasso’s themes and visual language. This can be seen clearly in the two pieces Group of Female Nudes (1921) by Picasso and Bathers of Es Llaner (1923) by Dalí, which are astoundingly close in their style and content. As he progressed, however, Dalí developed his own personal and distinctive expression while still retaining elements of Picasso’s visual language and symbolism, and when Dalí’s career took off, Picasso went from being his greatest source of inspiration to being his biggest rival.

picasso__group_of_female_nudesBathers of Es Llaner dali

The artists first met in 1926 when Dalí visited Picasso’s studio in Paris. At the time, Picasso was reworking a style of cubism infused with surrealist ideas of dreams, sexuality and the irrational. The visit equipped Dalí with a newfound maturity in his artistic language, making him more conscious of composition and symbolism in his work. Subsequently, they began to develop in parallel, from their work with surrealist “objects of symbolic function,” their powerful responses to the atrocities of the civil war and their work inspired by Velázquez.

In 1947 Dalí painted Portrait of Pablo Picasso in the Twenty-First Century (One of a series of portraits of Geniuses: Homer, Dalí, Freud, Christopher Columbus, William Tell, etc.), a slightly horrific portrait which sums up their deeply contradictory relationship. The painting uses heavy symbolism to criticise the “ugliness” that Dalí saw and disliked in Picasso’s later work while putting him on a pedestal and evoking his genius.Portrait-of-Picasso-in-the-Twenty-First-Century-1947-DALI


Calder Miro calder_miro

My old Sandy, this burly man with the
soul of a nightingale who blows on mobiles
this nightingale who makes his nest
in his mobiles
these mobiles scraping the bark
of the orange-coloured
where my great friend Sandy lives

Poem written by Miró for their 1961 exhibition “Miró-Calder” at Perls Gallery in New York

Miro by Calder

Portrait of Miro by Calder

Alexander Calder and Joan Miró first met in 1928 when the American artist visited Miró’s studio in Paris. Since then they maintained a deep and mutually inspiring friendship lasting almost 50 years during which they exchanged ideas, letters, paintings and gifts and collaborated on numerous exhibitions. There is a remarkable similarity in their creative sensibility. They were both heavily influenced by the surrealist movement, taking their inspiration from the unconscious, and applied heavy symbolism in their abstractions. They also shared a thematic interest in the circus and astrology.

Alexander Calder, Mobile au plomb Joan+Miro+-+The+Birth+of+the+World+
Calder’s mobiles have been been described as “living Miró abstractions” (Genauer, Emily, New York World-Telegram, 15 February 1936)

Joan Miro - Circus 1934

Circus. Joan Miró. 1934


Circus Rider. Alexander Calder

Constellations by Miro

Constellations by Miro

Calder constellation 2

Constellation by Calder

the-flight-of-the-dragonfly-in-front-of-the-sun MIRO

The Flight of the Dragonfly in Front of the Sun. Joan Miro


Painting by Calder


A song by Giulia y los Tellarini


Extract from Sylvia Plath‘s poem “Cut”

What a thrill —
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Jamon Jamon. Daniela Edburg.

Jamon Jamon. Daniela Edburg.

El Alma Dormida

Stanzas about the Death of his Father by Jorge Manrique

OH let the soul her slumbers break,
Let thought be quickened, and awake;
Awake to see
How soon this life is past and gone,
And death comes softly stealing on,
How silently!

Swiftly our pleasures glide away,
Our hearts recall the distant day
With many sighs;
The moments that are speeding fast
We heed not, but the past,—the past,
More highly prize.

El alma dormida (1981) Saavedra Fotografía Cristina García Rodero.

El Alma Dormida (The Sleeping Soul) is a photograph taken by Cristina Garcia Rodero in 1981 in Savedra, Spain. As Garcia Rodero was traveling around the country photographing Spanish festivals and traditions, she came across this little girl singing and jumping in front of the cemetery and quickly pulled out her camera. Now the moment is immortalized in this mysterious photograph. The title is inspired by the poem Coplas por la Muerte de su Padre by Jorge Manrique