5 Unmissable Events this Barcelona Gallery Weekend
Barcelona Gallery Weekend is almost here! Running from Thursday 15th until Sunday 19th, it’s one of the highlights of the year for art lovers in the city.
Barcelona Gallery Weekend is an annual event taking place across the city, featuring a programme of exhibitions, performances, talks, presentations and guided visits by the gallerists, artists and curators.
Our lead art advisor Mariella Franzoni, PhD has recommended her top 5 most unmissable events, to help you narrow down your options.
Of course we think you should clear your schedule and visit as many galleries as possible, but these are a great place to start…
¿Otra Vez? by Yago Hortal
Galeria SENDA
A must-see exhibition inaugurating a dramatically different style for Yago Hortal (Barcelona, 1983), who moves away from a hugely successful formula to introduce new concepts and techniques at Galeria SENDA.
Barcelona born and bred, Yago is known for his intense and mesmerising use of vivid colour, effervescent forms and sweeping strokes which bring such movement and a third dimension to the canvas.
Moving away from fluorescent tones, Hortal has adapted his colourful compositions to primary and natural hues. He sheds the impetus and vitality of the forms he had worked with until now, which masked the strokes and traces of brushes and paintbrushes. He replaces it with a layered work, with flat colours and carefully separated levels; what constitutes the painting, what is essential, “is not what is added, but what is subtracted”.
Our founder Gabby loved his retrospective exhibition earlier this year titled 'Allò era abans, això és ara' (which loosely translates to “that was then, this is now”) which explored the journey of his 14 year career so far. She also recently acquired a Yago Hortal piece for her personal collection - an art collector’s dream!
His latest body of work is a total departure that will catapult the artist into a new phase of his career. If you only make it to one exhibition - let this be it!
Indignadas (Outraged Women) by María María Acha-Kustcher
ADN Galeria
María María Acha-Kutscher, Indignadas. No me cuidan me violan. México, 2019-2021
Based in Madrid, María María Acha-Kutscher (Lima-Perú, 1968) is an international visual artist and co-director of the experimental art project Antimuseo. Her work centres on the woman, her story, the struggles for emancipation and equality, and the cultural construction of femininity.
This exhibition of her works at ADN Galeria looks set to be a fierce and powerful social critique, with a guided tour from the artist herself sharing her feminist pieces with a strong political dimension. We can’t wait!
Another phenomenal offering showing in parallel at ADN is by established Italian artist Marinella Senatore with “It’s Time to Go Back to Street”, a socially conscious commentary across a diverse range of mediums.
Marinella Senatore, It's time to go back to street, 2021
Memory Strata by Carmen M. Castañeda
Chiquita Room
Carmen M. Castañeda (Madrid, 1985) is a visual artist and researcher who studied the hand embroidery techniques of haute couture in Paris. Through the translation of hand embroidery techniques from high fashion to a more conceptual and experimental framework, the artist investigates the fragility of memory with an abstract, multidisciplinary and material language.
The repetition of the same gesture, the layering of time, the slow processes and the study of the materials construct an intimate language about time and memory. Memory Strata will be inaugurated with a guided tour from the artist herself on Wednesday evening at 18.30.
Canon by Mateo Maté
Palmadotze Gallery
Mateo Maté (Madrid, 1964) uses everyday objects, often linked to his own domestic routine, to explore how in late modernity the spaces we inhabit are traversed by tensions and violence in which the intimate and the social, the political and the existential, the individual and the collective become intermingled and confused.
Interested in the symbolic potential of the cartographic metaphor, Maté creates sculptural and performative spaces that, although being familiar to us, generate a profound confusion, as if they were plagued by latent dangers and disturbing enigmas. Canon brings something very unique and experimental to Barcelona Gallery Weekend and is the perfect excuse to explore beyond the city centre.
Pedro Moreno-Meyerhoff
The Marlborough Gallery
Pedro Moreno-Meyerhoff (Barcelona, 1954) is one of the greatest proponents of realism in Spain, and significant figure in the current renewal of Catalan realism. A self-taught artist, his work has been shown in a multitude of solo and group exhibitions and major fairs such as ARCO (Madrid) and FIAC (Paris). His work can be seen in institutions such as MACBA as well as in important national and international private collections.
The exhibition at The Marlborough Gallery will consist of fifteen oil paintings and eight drawings by the artist, covering his most celebrated themes from landscapes to bullfighters, still lifes or urban views, all of them with the particular attention to detail of Moreno-Meyerhoff .
The artist seeks to portray those spaces in transformation, urban ruins, moments of struggle, all that ephemeral moment that captures his attention and is immortalised through a brushstroke as melancholic and nostalgic as it is moving and sensual.
Our Guide to Barcelona breaks down the best Art Districts in the city and would make the perfect companion to your Barcelona Gallery Weekend experience.
What art events and exhibitions are you most looking forward to this Autumn? We’d love to hear from you over on Instagram!
