The best coming art

art

The pan­demic is still here, but life goes on, and so does cul­tural ac­tiv­ity, de­spite the many dif­fi­cul­ties. How­ever, there will be some re­ally great art to see this year. So, what ex­hi­bi­tions should we not miss in 2021? Surely there is some­thing for every­one in the fol­low­ing list of pro­pos­als.

War and art. Barcelona and Gaudí. These are the two the­matic blocks at the MNAC. The first will offer ex­hi­bi­tions by the pho­tog­ra­pher An­toni Campañà (in­clud­ing some un­pub­lished ma­te­r­ial from the Civil War), and the artist Francesc Tor­res.

Dur­ing the sec­ond half of the year, the mu­seum will re­view Gaudí’s legacy with a new view pre­sent­ing him in re­la­tion to both to the Barcelo­nan con­text and the Eu­ro­pean avant-garde move­ments. The Mnac will also re­cover one of the ex­hi­bi­tions that could not be shown last year be­cause of of the pan­demic: the one es­tab­lish­ing the cre­ative links be­tween Llorens Ar­ti­gas and Hamada Shoji.

Macba starts off with the post-colo­nial­ist art of Félix González-Tor­res, in Política de la relació (March 26 to Sep­tem­ber 12). The mu­seum in Plaça dels Àngels aims to pay homage to the Cuban cre­ator and fore­run­ner of queer aes­thet­ics, who died of AIDS in 1996. An­other big show at the Macba (May 13 to No­vem­ber 21) will focus on the Cata­lan con­cep­tual art of the sev­en­ties, eight­ies and nineties, a pro­ject sup­ported by the art col­lec­tor Rafael Tous.

Mart.​El mi­rall ver­mell (Feb­ru­ary 24 to July 11) will kick off the year at the CCCB with high doses of re­al­ity to make us re­flect on the bat­tered planet Earth. Our planet and its ways of life, not only the human ones, will be the focus of Ciència fricció. Viure entre espècies com­pa­nyes (from June 8 to No­vem­ber 28). Life and liv­ing processes will also fea­ture in a per­for­ma­tive ex­per­i­ment, Urban na­ture (from July 1 to Sep­tem­ber 19) by the Ri­m­ini Pro­to­col the­atre. And in La màscara mai menteix (De­cem­ber 2021 to May 2022), the CCCB will scru­ti­nise the mask as a po­lit­i­cal tool used by all ide­o­log­i­cal stripes. The anti-Covid mask will, of course, have some­thing to say about that.

The new sea­son at Caix­aFo­rum of Barcelona will open with the oblig­a­tory names of pop art (Robert Rauschen­berg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Willem de Koon­ing...) in the ex­hi­bi­tion, The Amer­i­can Dream (from March 3 to June 13), which will be pro­vided by the British Mu­seum col­lec­tion.

There will also be space for an im­mer­sive ex­pe­ri­ence cre­ated by the Japan­ese col­lec­tive, team­Lab, which will merge art, tech­nol­ogy and na­ture (April 21 to Au­gust 29). In ad­di­tion, the Georges Pom­pi­dou cen­tre will send its col­lec­tions for a ret­ro­spec­tive of the de­signer and French en­gi­neer, Jean Prouvé (from July 15 to Oc­to­ber 31).

The Miró Foun­da­tion will ex­plore the roots of Cata­lan moder­nity with Joan Miró and ADLAN (March 12 to July 4). This is an in­ves­ti­ga­tion cooked slowly and col­lec­tively in nu­mer­ous archives that pre­served doc­u­men­ta­tion of this group of vi­sion­ar­ies, the Friends of Art Nou­veau (ADLAN), which put Barcelona on the map of the most ar­tis­ti­cally ad­vanced places in Eu­rope in the thir­ties.

Pi­casso i les joies, is the main event of the year at the Museu Pi­casso(from May 20 to Sep­tem­ber 26), a pro­ject on one of the artist’s least known pur­suits, artis­tic jew­elry, which often has an in­ti­mate char­ac­ter, since the artist would make it for his part­ners. Pi­casso’s jew­els were often made with hum­ble ob­jects found, for ex­am­ple, on the beach.

The Museu del Dis­seny will also dress up in jew­ellery with an ex­hi­bi­tion ded­i­cated to the first women jew­ellers who worked in Cat­alo­nia dur­ing the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tury: Joieres. 1965-1990. Art, ex­per­i­mentació i dis­seny (Sep­tem­ber to No­vem­ber). The mu­seum in Plaça de les Glo­ries will also put on To­cades per Ba­len­ci­aga (June to Oc­to­ber), a fes­ti­val of hats cre­ated by the fa­mous de­signer in the thir­ties and late six­ties.

In June, it will open Per­petuum Mo­bile, with work by the ar­chi­tect, Enric Mi­ralle­sas.

At the Fun­dació Fo­to­Colecta­nia, the pi­o­neer­ing re­porter Mary Ellen Mark will have the ret­ro­spec­tive, Vides de dones (March 18 to June 27), ex­plor­ing the ideas that sus­tain the fem­i­nist move­ment today.