Barcelona Gallery Weekend, between memory and hyperreality

Next weekend, Barcelona Gallery Weekend will celebrate twelve editions promoted by ArtBarcelona, ​​the association that brings together the most prominent galleries in the Catalan capital and that seeks, with this initiative, to vindicate their work as spaces that generate culture and knowledge in which artists, collectors, institutions and the general public can strengthen ties.

From September 17 to 20, twenty-five contemporary and modern art galleries in Barcelona and L’Hospitalet de Llobregat will present thirty-eight exhibitions dedicated to fifty creators; To these we must add the twelve, of an ephemeral nature, that make up the program FLASH and that, unlike the rest, can only be visited this weekend.

Beginning our review in L’Hospitalet, the Alegría gallery will host a site-specific joint project by Lluís Bisbe, author of sculptures and installations that transform everyday objects to generate strangeness and question the environment, and Jacobo Castellano, who also seeks to recontextualize objects loaded with memory and history, integrating them into matter, especially wood.

Eulàlia Rovira, for her part, arrives at ethall with “Clin.”, a new sculptural installation in dialogue with the gallery’s architecture, and there Sergio Prego will also show an unpublished piece from his series The foreign faceinspired by the ceramic motifs and vessels that appear in the film of the same name by Hiroshi Teshigahara. Juande Jarillo and Martín Vitali star in their participation in FLASH.

Already in Barcelona capital, and in the Gràcia neighborhood, House of Chappaz offers us “Front Running y Trampa”, by Momu & No Es, the duo composed of Lucía Moreno Murillo and Eva Noguera Escudero. We will contemplate a workstation, an embodied stele and a flow of corporate information to explore the possible coexistence of multiple temporalities and spaces, and reflect on the ways in which we construct meaning in contemporary reality.

The Portuguese Ana Jotta and the American Allen Ruppersberg share a generation and interest in collecting materials from popular culture. At ProjecteSD, in Eixample, they bring us “O Jogo da Glória”, an exhibition that is structured around a mural drawing created by Jotta for the occasion and that will serve as a framework to house works by both.

Zielinsky, meanwhile, opts for the sculptures of the Valencian Amparo Tormo, who combines industrial elements in her creations, from iron and steel to MDF plates and stainless surfaces, to reveal the interior of the objects, and Marc Domènech inaugurates «1959. Joan Claret. Paintings”, an exhibition FLASH focused on a key year in the career of Joan Claret i Corominas, in which he consolidated for the first time the bases of his later geometric language. A prominent figure in Catalan abstraction, he developed fundamental works in those months that marked his definitive turn towards constructivism.

ADN Galeria’s proposal is “FANTASTIC PLANET: The Wild Planet”, its third individual by the artist and co-founder of Malpaís Joan Pallé. It will feature small-format sculptures that start from the codes of the model and figuration to explore their narrative potential, along with works on paper with references to graphic design, posters and infographics of accentuated expressiveness.

Furthermore, in her first exhibition in that gallery, Gema Polanco will display installations, textiles, drawings, collages and photographs to articulate, from personal experience and the vindication of the role of women in creation, a plural vision that questions the traditional roles of the feminine. And in the program FLASHADN commemorates two decades of collaboration between Eugenio Merino and this space.

At Victor Lope Arte Contemporáneo we will contemplate “The Architecture of Power”, by Kepa Garraza, a retrospective focused on his decade of research into the visual construction of power: monuments, propaganda, press photography or military iconography. Likewise, as part of the program FLASHGarraza will show a selection of works from the “Horses” series, which revisits the tradition of equestrian portraiture.

SELTZ by Ritter Ferrer will inaugurate “The future is no longer what it was”, by Francesc Torres, a new production that delves into the failed promises of modernity, the erosion of political narratives and the fragility of contemporary certainties. It will be through paintings, photographs, objects and installations that link the individual and the collective. And along those lines, and in Mayoral, Vicenç Altaió curates “Permanent Present”, a journey through different generations and contemporary languages, with works by Albert Serra, Alexander Calder, Antoni Tàpies, Antonio Saura, Fernando Botero, Fernand Léger, JL Barquero, Jordi Alcaraz, Joan Miró, Marria Pratts, Niki de Saint Phalle, Pablo Picasso, Regina Giménez and Salvador Dalí, among others.

The unclassifiable Mariaelena Roqué exhibits “UnaDonaUna · AutoRetratRetratat” in RocioSantaCruz, while the project FLASH of this room is for Antonio Saura: it will consist of an artist’s book and the series of etchings L’odeur de la saintetéwith text by Fernando Arrabal.

We walk towards the center. “What has flight”, by Laía Argüelles Folch, in Chiquita Room, investigates the possibilities of transforming any legacy using found materials and, in the program FLASH“hook, Line and Sinker” will display a selection of editions that condense the artistic practice of the Dutchman Pieter Laurens Mol.

àngels barcelona returns to the classics: it hosts «Anima Mundi. Graphic Thinking”, by Eulàlia Valldosera, an exhibition that highlights how graphic thinking and writing constitute the substrate of a multidisciplinary work that explores how the physical and psychic body are inscribed and deployed in space. Furthermore, in the program FLASHthey show us a new project from Lúa Coderch.

The historic Sala Parés, for its part, inaugurates two painting exhibitions intertwined in literary narrative, the construction of the image and reflection on the contemporary pictorial form. This is “The Great Gatsby”, with pictorial compositions by Ángel Mateo Charris, Juan Cuéllar, Marcos Palazzi, Gonzalo Sicre and Cuqui Guillén, which departs from the universe of Scott Fitzgerald’s novel to delve into issues such as desire, excess, identity and social appearance; and “Company Paintings, 2025–2026,” by Guillermo Pérez Villalta, which offers small and medium-sized paintings and drawings that delve into the idea of ​​classicity.

From Poblenou to Trafalgar, “Miralda: Archivo Open” is Palmadotze’s FLASH choice, which moves to FoodCultura, in Poblenou. And Lebanese Mounira Al Solh brings to Bombon Projects a textile installation that focuses on a childhood memory of her country’s civil war: awakened by the bombings, her mother encouraged her to embroider around the holes she made in her pajamas. Years later, she turned that gesture into a collective embroidery project with women from Lebanon and the Netherlands.

Likewise, “Get Rala”, in Dilalica, structures a set of pieces by Mikel Escobales around space as a place in constant transformation. His installation will consist of diverse materials that he understands as catalysts between language and reality, between the immaterial and the material. Dilalica also participates in FLASH with an installation co-curated with Blanca Pujals: “States of indetermination”, which is based on the thoughts of architect Yago Conde.

As for Suburbia Contemporary, which opens its headquarters at Trafalgar 36, it opens “Land of the Living”, by Jake Aikman, a British author who imagines a simultaneously physical and mental space where perception oscillates between presence and dissolution. in the program FLASHthis space presents TEARJERKERby Ed Young, a South African author focused on ways of reading and the tension between the explicit and the implicit.

In another new space, that of 3 Punts Galeria in Trafalgar, the sculptor Alejandro Monge dissects the concept of synthetic nature, which runs through his work and redefines the relationship between the organic, the artificial and the built, while Sorondo Projects joins Barcelona Gallery Weekend for the first time with a double proposal: for the general program, a duo of Venezuelan artists María Elena Pombo and Miguel Braceli, and for FLASHthe work of the young Russian living in Barcelona Nikolay Morgunov, whose creations are based on predefined grids and systems but do not suggest stability.

Escat Gallery, which is also participating for the first time, brings us “The Clouds Have No Home”, a project by Federica Furbelli that reviews the vital landscape through ritual as a contemporary practice of roots and reconnection, and Pigment Gallery opens the course with “The Time That Remains”, a selection of works made by Ignacio Iñigo during the last three years, in which the painting moves from the image towards the investigation of matter, time and transformation. In dialogue with this group, Lorenzo Fernández presents a painting based on a three-dimensional structure created by Iñigo from acrylic, generating a cross between image, object and sculpture.

Prats Nogueras Blanchard will inaugurate “Karim Rosa”, the first individual in the Lucía C. Pino gallery, which analyzes sculptural materials and processes – especially textiles and metal – taking into account sustainability and circularity criteria.

«Dance Calligraphy», for its part, will be Pavel Korbička’s second solo exhibition at Al-Tiba9 Gallery, which is also participating for the first time in Barcelona Gallery Weekend. He laces it with an installation of monumental light sculptures, the result of an obsession: the recording of the ephemeral movement of dance.

Finally, and in his first monograph in a gallery, the Granollers artist Gabriel Ventura traces in FUGA a brief tour of the archive of the FEDC (Front for Emancipation and Collective Delirium), a fictitious armed organization created in the context of a book that he has just created.

Six voices, within the initiative Cop de coroffer their recommendations so as not to get lost in the exhibition tidal wave: this is Pablo Allepuz, head of collection at the Museu Tàpies; Àngels de la Mota, former gallery owner and art advisor; Ianko López, manager and cultural journalist; Pilar Ortega, architect and collector; Gemma Avinyó, cultural manager and deputy director of the Fundació Sorigué; and Álvaro González Cerezo and Jorge Fernández Gómez, architects and collectors.