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Kiosko Universal in the Mercat de la Boqueria

The Boqueria Market, also known as Sant Josep, just off the Ramblas, has many interesting things to show to the visitors and buyers. From the spectacular and colorful variety of fruit and vegetable stalls at the entrance from the Ramblas or the amazing round center with the fresh fish and seafood over the icy countertops to preserve them at low temperature or the stalls of meats from different animals: bull, ox, cow, horse, lamb, veal and hunting animals or birds and eggs; the amazing and varied collection of mushrooms when the season comes, the stalls with pork products, pates and cheeses or...

Art and Culture > Art Exhibitions

Modern and present - Turn of the Century in the Macba Collection

This new MACBA exhibition establishes the thesis that the emergence of the modern aesthetic in a cultural context starts on the 1950's, and not in the first half of the twentieth century. From this time and until the 1980's, the practice of art and blossoming of new material forms should be considered essentially related with architecture and design. The MACBA Collection, which includes works that are owned by various public and private agencies Catalan, Spanish and European, is the backbone of the MACBA and works as a table of genetic code and testing for the Museum project. The concept...

Art and Culture > Barcelona Highlights

Plaça Catalunya Barcelona Square

Plaça Catalunya once stood outside the city walls, and was a yard outside the city located just in front of one of the main gates, from roads started to the surrounding populations. This made it the ideal place to for an open market and became an important point in the life of the city. When the walls were demolished the new city urban plan (L’Eixample) designed by Ildefonso Cerdà. Cerdà  did not include any special place where the Plaça Catalunya is now located, since, according to the project, the Barcelona Gothic neighborhood and the other old...

Art and Culture > Barcelona Highlights

Monastery of Sant Pau del Camp

Inside Barcelona there are few examples of the Romanesque Art. The Church of Sant Pau del Camp (Saint Paul of the field) together with a small cloister, in the Raval Neighborhood,  are the only buildings that remain from the Monastery of Sant Pau del Camp, an important Romanesque structure that at the time was outside of the city walls in a flat area surrounded by farm land (the rural location gave the monastery its name). There are no accurate information about the monastery's origins, but was supposedly founded in the late ninth century. This date was set for the tombstone found...

Art and Culture > Art Exhibitions

Gil J Wolman. I am immortal and alive

Gil Joseph Wolman (1929–1995) was a French artist born in Paris, pioneer in researching the intersection and alteration of visual and textual languages. His work encompassed painting, poetry and film-making. Wolman was an active agent provocateur from an early age. He formed part with Isidore Isou of the avant garde Letterist movement in the early 1950s. The Lettrism was an artistic and intellectual movement. It maintained that the expressive heights of all artistic languages (poetry, music, painting, etc) had already been reached, and that a stagnant historical moment had arrived where...

Art and Culture > Art Exhibitions

Universal Archive

Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) - October 08 to January 09 The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia. The exhibition explores the role of photography as a notion of document in history, and it is organized into two main parts. The first part poses some major discussions on the photographic paper in the modern period, roughly from 1850 to 1980. The second area, Public Spaces Photographic focuses on the documents of the exhibition spaces of El Lissitzky between 1928 and 1930. The third area explores the notion of photography as a tool for social...

Art and Culture > Outdoor Sculptures

Jorge Oteiza - La Ola

Jorge Oteiza Enbil, born at Orio, Gipuzkoa, in the Basque Country, worked as painter, designer and writer, and became one of the main theorists on Basque modern art. He started his career at the end of the twenties, with primitive works. Between 1935 and 1947 he takes up a great trip abroad to South America. Upon his return to Spain, he becomes the talk at all innovation-trend exhibitions and in public projects (Basilica de Aranzazu, 1950-1969) evidently featuring international projection: in fact, he was one of the winners in the IV Biennale exhibition of Sao Paulo, 1957. During that time...

Art and Culture > Outdoor Sculptures

Fernando Botero - CAT

There are some times that it looks difficult for a sculpture to find a place in a city. It is what it has happen to this big bronze sculpture of the Cat (seven metres long and two tons of weight) from Fernando Botero. First installed in the Ciutadella Park in 1989, was moved because of the Olympic Games in 1992 to the Montjuich Mountain close to the Olympic Stadium, but it did not stay long in this second emplacement; and only some months after the Olympics, by express wish of the sculptor, was moved to a small square on the rear wall of Drassanes building that did not made happy to anybody,...

Art and Culture > Art Exhibitions

Francesc Torres. Da capo

MACBA Museum Barcelona - June to September The Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona dedicates this retrospective exhibition to the work of Francesc Torres. The tile of the exhibition “Da Capo” makes reference to a vision of the human condition related both to history and time, and which questions the nature of evolution. Formed in the Escola Massana of Barcelona; in 1967 goes to Paris, where he attends classes in l'Ecole DES Beaux Arts and exerts of assistant of Piotr Kowalski, Polish sculptor and architect, that will exert remarkable influence over Torres. Moves to the...

Art and Culture > Barcelona Highlights

Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu

El Raval - Gothic Neighbourhood It looks like time has stopped in this Archaeological Gothic Complex, one of Europe's earliest medical complexes, build up to put together in one building six hospitals that existed at the time. The first stone was laid by King Martí el Humà in 1401 and mainly developed in between the XV and XVI centuries. It was planned by the architect Guillem Abiell as a big space in a form of four wings on two levels that surrounded an arched patio, following a well-known model from the orient, but it has suffered some important changes through the following...

Art and Culture > Art Exhibitions

Joan Jonas -Transparencies in a Dark Room

MACBA - Barcelona - September 07 - January 08 Timelines: Transparencies in a Dark Room This is the first retrospective exhibition in Spain of the work of Joan Jonas (New York, 1936), one of the pioneering artists in performance art, experimental film and video installation. The exhibition consists essentially of four installations that are representative of her career, together with a series of films, single-channel videos, drawings and photographs, that between them present a reading of her work that draws a connection between her practice of performance art and the origins of video installation...

Art and Culture > Art Exhibitions

Somalia: Surviving oblivion

Centro de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona  - April/May 2007 There is a map on which communities that are not part of the processes that dominate world geopolitics are condemned to oblivion. These communities are overlooked by the international political agenda, and so are banished from the sphere of solutions and political responsibilities. In this awareness-raising project by MSF, the multimedia installation Somalia, based on photographs by Pep Bonet, is the starting point for a series of activities, culminating in the debate Geography of forgotten crises, organised by the CCCB. Words...

Art and Culture > Art Exhibitions

THAT'S NOT ENTERTAINMENT! Film Answers Film

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. December 06 to March 07 Exhibition in the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona This exhibition presents the cinema of experimentation and social and artistic commitment: a form of cinema that is the product of rage or reflection, that does not seek to please the tastes or the opinions of a majority, that is motivated by the urgency of transmitting something important, something that will open our eyes, move us and expand our knowledge. The installations and works that are present in this exhibition, despite their invisibility...