Barcelona Gallery Weekend opens first edition with over 40 artistic spaces around the city

Barcelona (CNA).- Barcelona Gallery Weekend will hold its first edition from the 1^st to the 4^th of October offering a vast opportunity for visitors to get to know international artists and their work in forty different spaces throughout Catalonia’s capital city. The programme offers four routes in different urban areas including galleries, institutions and unusual spaces in order to “make the journey comfortable” so that visitors can organise a visit to all the galleries during the four days, stated head of Barcelona Gallery Weekend, Imma Mora. The project, promoted by the Barcelona Art Association, aims to show the artistic potential of the city and place it among the international benchmarks in the sector. Thus, it incorporates some of the galleries, museums and art centres most representative of Barcelona, ​​with additional support from Barcelona City Council, the Catalan Government, the Ministry of Culture and the City Council of L'Hospitalet, among other private sponsors and patrons.

Over twenty galleries with a wide artistic range

This first edition of the Gallery Weekend will take place across 21 galleries with institutions such as the Joan Miró Foundation, the Fundació Suñol, MACBA, the MNAC, the Picasso Museum and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe collaborating, and with opening hours and special activities designed and adapted specifically for the event.

There will be a vast range of artwork from internationally established artists such as American Matt Mullican, who will present an installation of over 600 collages on paper where his encyclopedic universe is displayed at large, Mladen Stilinovi?, conceptual artist and one of the leading figures of the so-called “New Art Practice” in Croatia, and realistic Spanish painter and sculptor, Antonio Lopez. The event will also include exhibitions by key artists from Barcelona itself, ​​including Perejaume, Antoni Llena, Rogelio López Cuenca, Daniel G. Andújar, and Francesc Ruiz, who represented the Spanish pavilion this year at the Venice Art Biennale, one of the most important contemporary art exhibitions in Europe.

Risky proposals and the Catalan Avant-garde

Certain galleries have opted for riskier proposals, with artists such as French-Moroccan video-artist Bouchra Khalili, whose work focuses on strategies and discourses of resistance as narrated by political minorities, and U.S. alternative cartoonist Matt Madden, who will present his project ‘20 lines’, displaying their work. Some exhibitions will contrast art in different languages by showing works of emerging artists like Diego Pujal and Ruth Moran, whilst other displays will be centred around a specific project like Ángel Marcos’‘Alrededor del sueño’, (‘About dreams’) which deals with global urbanism.

Certain exhibitions are also committed to the history of the avant-garde. Works by Uruguayan Joaquín Torres García, one of the most complex and important artists of the first half of the 20th century who was personally involved in the early avant-garde Catalan Noucentismo movement, will be shown and coincides with his major retrospective at the the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Screenings of Alberto Magnelli and Fausto Melotti in dialogue with Joan Miró and group exhibitions with works by Salvador Dali, Alexander Calder, Juan Gris, Julio Gonzalez, Miquel Barceló, Antoni Miralda and Carlos Pazos, among others, will also be on display.

Compositions and art installations throughout the city

As a complementary activity, the project will host an additional ‘Compositions Programme’, organised by the team ‘Latituds’, an independent curatorial office based in Barcelona that works internationally within the field of contemporary art and aims to convert the city into a great artistic space. Artists from or working in Barcelona have set up installations and artworks in unique venues throughout the city, including the Freudian Field Library and the tropical greenhouse in the Ciutadella Park, to enable visitors to discover unfamiliar urban spaces. Mariana Canepa, one of the commissioners of the programme, has stated that this will “distinguish” the event from other art exhibitions.