Aqua Mater. Sebastião Salgado

As of 28 October, the Sala Castellana 214 at the Canal Foundation will host the first major exhibition devoted to Sebastião Salgado following his death in 2025. This exhibition delves into the work of the Brazilian photographer in relation to water, with around one hundred large format black and white photographs that travel around some of the most extraordinary landscapes on the planet.

Curated by Lélia Wanick Salgado, the Aqua Mater exhibition, which has already been on display in cities in France or Italy, will be incorporating a selection of images from the Glaciers series for the first time on its visit to Madrid.

Through around one hundred photographs, this reflective exhibition highlights the force and immensity of an element like water. Aqua Mater is the name of a project that explores the unique sensitivity with which nature is portrayed by the Brazilian artist, one of the leading contemporary photographers, specifically highlihghting water as a source of life in its different states: solid, liquid and gas.

The exhibition is the result of more than 25 years of travels by Sebastião Salgado (Brazil, 1944 – France, 2025) since the mid-1990s to the most remote places on the planet, such as Antarctica, Canada, Patagonia, Amazonia, Iceland, the Himalayas, Russia or South Georgia, among others.