exhibition

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA) is expanding into the nearby Àngels Square in the heart of the historic neighbourhood Raval. On 17^th July the museum unveiled the details of its future plans, which are designed to increase the flow of visitors to the art centre. These include increased exhibition spaces and the expansion of the existing MACBA Study Centre. The project is estimated to cost a total of €2 million, 1.5 million of which will be provided by Barcelona City Council, and it is hoped that this will increase the number of visitors to the museum by 15% per year.

On the 16^th July Barcelona art centre Caixaforumopened its last major exhibition of the season entitled ´Beauty captivates. Little treasures from the Museo del Prado´. The exhibition contains 135 small canvases from the great artists within Madrid´s museum collection such as Velázquez, El Greco, Rubens, Goya and Tiziano. It will run for almost six months, until the 5^th of January 2015. The exhibition will enable visitors to contemplate the virtuosity of great masters of painting from the 14^th to the 19^th century dealing with small-scale works. It is the second largest collection of works that a host museumhas exhibited from the Museo del Prado, one of Europe's largest art collections.

Promising Catalan architect Josep Alegre Torrents has presented his 'Arquitectures Empeltades' project to the 14^th International Architecture Exhbition held at the Venice Biennale, sponsored by the Ramon Llull Institute, the public body promoting Catalan culture abroad. "We want to show an attitude, a way of working to make the architecture relate and work with existing elements" explained Torrents, who said he wanted "to show the ways of doing things in Catalonia." It is the second time that Catalonia is participating in the Biennale International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. The current edition of this prestigious exhibition is entitled Fundamentals and is directed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. It will be open to the public from June 7 through to November 23, 2014.

Marcel·lí Antúnez Roca, one of the founders of the Catalan theatrical group ‘La Fura dels Baus’ has presented an exhibition in Arts Santa Mònica, a cultural centre run by the Catalan Government in Barcelona's famous Les Rambles. The display showcases the artist’s unusual dramatic method, which he names ‘Sistematúrgia’. This concept conceives theatre as a combination of robotics, corporal interfaces and audiovisuals systems. Apart from the exhibition, which will be open to the public until April 4th, this initiative also includes live performances by Antúnez once a week. ‘La Fura dels Baus’ produced the opening ceremony of the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games.

From this Monday onwards, visiting the fortress at the top of Barcelona’s Montjuïc hill will cost €5. Special discounts will be available as well as free admissions on special days, like the other museums in the city. Within Montjuïc Castle, history-related exhibitions will be held. Visitors can currently discover the exhibition ‘Postwar Barcelona’, organised by the City Council’s Archives with the collaboration of the Carles Pi i Sunyer Foundation. The exhibition starts with Franco’s troops entering the city on the 26^th of January 1939 and finishes with the end of term of Fascist Mayor Miquel Mateu i Pla in 1945. In fact, it is a time travel back to post Civil War Barcelona, displaying more than 250 documents, including illustrations and photos, as well as historical texts and articles.

Le Corbusier, one of the key figures of twentieth-century architecture, was more than a mere creator of buildings. His ideas on urban planning, furniture design and his innovative blending of architecture within the surrounding landscape are an integral part of his unconventional work. Such different creative facets of the artist are at the core of the exhibition “Le Corbusier. An atlas of modern landscapes”, held at Barcelona’s CaixaForum from the 29^th of January to the 11^th of May. The exhibition, the largest dedicated to the artist in the past 25 years, displays 215 objects from the MoMA and the ‘Fondation Le Corbusier’, which stress the extent of his contribution to international architecture.

The Drawing Centre in New York will host an exhibition focused on the creative mind of internationally famous Chef Ferran Adrià, who used to run El Bulli, deemed the world’s best restaurant on five occasions. Adrià’s cuisine is characterised by taking a molecular approach towards cooking. Called both genius and insanity, the Catalan Chef’s goal was to push the boundaries of modern gastronomy, by embracing innovation and tantalising the senses in a spectacle of scientifically precise yet artistically creative food. This new exhibition entitled Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity will reveal such a creative process. The exhibition will run in New York from the 25^th of January to the 28^th of February before moving to Cleveland in September.

Barcelona’s next Mobile World Congress, which will take place from the 24^th to the 27^th of February, should be the “best edition ever”, according to the CEO of GSMA and Director of the event, John Hoffman. Indeed, 75,000 visitors are expected to attend the world’s most important fair in the mobile industry, meaning 3,000 more than in February 2013. Besides, so far, five weeks ahead of the opening, the number of online registrations is already 15% higher than last year. The economic impact on the Catalan capital will be an additional income of €356 million and the creation of 7,220 jobs. One of the highlights of this year’s edition will be the participation of Facebook-inventor Mark Zuckerberg, who will give a conference on the 24^th of February.

The Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris will open on Wednesday, January, 15^th an exhibition entitled ‘Camouflages’, devoted to the renowned photographer Joan Fontcuberta . Thanks to 10 series of photographs, visitors will journey through the works of the Catalan artist, who was awarded the prestigious Hasselblad prize in 2013, considered as ‘the Photography Nobel Prize’. The jury had highlighted that Fontcuberta was “one of the most imaginative contemporary photographers” of our time. The exhibition, which will occupy three of the four floors of the MEP, explores the notions of ??camouflage, concealment, and disguise: camouflage of the artist, of photography, of reality, and of truth.

The Picasso Museum of the Catalan capital will no longer be solely run by the municipality. From the 1^st of January 2014, it will be managed by the public-private Picasso Museum Foundation. This will be the beginning of a new era for the museum, which is set to focus on the conservation, study and development of its own artistic heritage, by launching the ‘Centre de Referència Picassiana on-line’, dedicated to researching and teaching Picasso around the world. The managers of the museum also wish to delve into the influence of Picasso on contemporary art. Such an idea is at the core of the next exhibition dedicated to the illustrious painter: Post-Picasso: Contemporary Artists' Response to His Art, held from the 7^th of March to the 29^th of June, 2014.

The National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC) hosts the retrospective ‘I work the street’ dedicated to photographer Joan Colom. It is the very first time an exhibition presents all of the artist’s works, amongst which are many previously unpublished images. From the 12^th of December 2013 to the 25^th of May 2014, visitors will be able to see 500 pictures, notably Colom’s most iconic images: black and white photos secretly taken in Barcelona’s Raval in the 1960s. His feature stories from the 1990s are also presented to the public. Colom’s donation of various photographic materials in 2012 enabled such a comprehensive exhibition to take place. The Director of the MNAC, Pepe Serra, said the exhibition was unusual in many aspects.

The 2013 winner of the prestigious Hasselblad Foundation Photography Award – which is like the Nobel Prize in this field – has been exploring the “aesthetics of censorship” in texts dating from the 16^th to the 19^th century. The “violent interventions” of censors are revealed in ‘Deletrix’, a series of photographs taken by Catalan Joan Fontcuberta and exhibited at the Santa Mònica Arts Centre of Barcelona. In addition, Fontcuberta also releases a book displaying the artist’s 6 years of delving into archives and libraries. Fonctuberta did not wish to solely condemn censorship and defend freedom of expression.  He also observed that the “violent” and “visceral energy” expressed in these human interventions influenced some contemporary works of art. And therefore, the photographer sought to explore the relationship between art and censorship.

Catalonia’s National Museum of Art (MNAC) proposes a new way to discover its Romanesque Art collection – which is the most important in the world – through the eyes of an important figure of European Contemporary Art: the Catalan Painter, Sculptor and Essayist Antoni Tàpies (1923 - 2012). The Barcelona-based museum has carried out a “small intervention” in the halls of the Romanesque collection so that visitors are able to see the exhibited works with interpretation elements and views linked with Tàpies’ work and thoughts. In addition, the MNAC is also exhibiting one of the artist’s most emblematic works: the Romanesque Painting with Barratina (Pintura Romànica i Barretina, 1971)

Three exhibitions convey the splendour of the city of Girona (in north-eastern Catalonia) during the Middle Ages. The curators of all three exhibitions wished to break away from the notion of “darkness” which is often associated with such times, when these several centuries actually shaped the city’s glorious past. Visitors can get acquainted with 13^th century Jewish doctors or intellectuals, walk down the streets of Medieval Girona, and contemplate masterpieces such as the portrait of Catalan King Peter III. The City Museum, the Museum of Jewish History and the Monastery of Sant Daniel are hosting exhibitions on medieval Girona until the 30^th of March 2014.

Barcelona has unveiled a new museum located in the Born neighbourhood, next to the Gothic quarter, which explores how life was in the city during the early 18^th century, and will exhibit 8,000 objects. The Born Cultural Centre shows the neighbourhood’s ruins dating from 1714, when residents were forced to destroy their own homes and leave without any compensation after Barcelona’s military defeat. Next to the area, the largest urban military citadel in Europe was built, being part of the fierce repression that the Bourbon troops inflicted on Catalan citizens. From that moment onwards, Catalonia lost its self-government institutions, its own laws and freedoms, and Catalan language was banned and persecuted with the aim to homogenise the recently-formed Spain.