Barcelona Gallery Weekend Announces its 2020 Edition
The 6th Barcelona Gallery Weekend 2020 confirms its September schedule and reveals the galleries participating this year.
- 28 galleries will inaugurate theexhibition season celebrating the 6th Barcelona Gallery Weekend from 17th to 20th September.
- Both emerging and established artists from all over the world will position Barcelona as one of the leading contemporary art scenes.
- The galleries will host a busy schedule of special activities for a range of audiences and a specific programme for professionals from the art world, as well as celebrating their irreplaceable role as cultural producers and promoters.
Rubén Martín de Lucas, Veintiséis personas esperando autorización para entrar en un círculo acotado, 2017. Courtesy Pigment Gallery.
Barcelona, 1st July 2020 The 6th Barcelona Gallery Weekend will be held from 17th to 20th September, confirming its place in the art world’s international calendar of events. Barcelona Gallery Weekend, conceived and promoted by Art Barcelona (Abe), the Contemporary Art Galleries Association, for whom this year marks thirty years of activity, and in collaboration with the Gremi de Galeries d'Art de Catalunya, will kick off the exhibition season with 28 participating galleries and more than 60 exhibiting artists.
Since its first edition in 2015, Barcelona Gallery Weekend has advocated the role of art galleries as an integral feature in maintaining the health of the cultural scene. This year, more than ever, given the difficult and historic circumstances which threaten the survival of the artistic apparatus, this event underlines just how important galleries are as freely-accessible public spaces whose activities contribute to the sustenance and growth of art and culture. In their role as pioneers in discovering new talent and supporting production, they represent a cornerstone of the artistic ecosystem, providing spaces to experiment and generate knowledge. In the great cultural organism, galleries represent the neurons that connect artists, collectors, the public and institutions.
Given the dramatic crisis that has emerged this year following the SARS-CoV-2 virus outbreak, Barcelona Gallery Weekend’s 2020 programme will focus exclusively on exhibitions at the 28 participating galleries and will promote a series of parallel activities that are also scheduled to take place in these spaces.
In a world where globalisation has been revealed its weaknesses, the Gallery Weekend format, which avoids mass gatherings in exhibition halls and values the personality of each gallery, looks to rethink the relationship between exhibition spaces and their audience, favouring leisurely dialogue and health-and-safety-conscious measures.
Jordi Marcet i Rosa Vila-Abadal, Artèria il.lustrada, 2016. Courtesy Artur Ramon Art.
GALLERIES
This year’s Barcelona Gallery Weekend will incorporate some new faces such as the recently-opened Chiquita Room in Sant Antoni district, H2O in Gràcia dictrict or the notable Galeria Cortina, who are taking part in the event for the first time. The programme also features previous collaborators such as Alalimón, Bombon Projects, Dilalica, Espai Tactel.Toormix and Uxval Gochez (formerly Arte Aurora), all of which have opened within the past four years and could be considered the city’s youngest generation of galleries. Galeria SENDA and Projecte SD have signed up back with a formidable offer, accompanied by galleries that have been part of Barcelona Gallery Weekend since the beginning: ADN Galería, Ana Mas Projects, àngels barcelona, etHALL, Galeria Carles Taché, Galeria Joan Prats, Galeria Marc Domènech, Mayoral, NoguerasBlanchard and Sala Parés. The remaining galleries to be opening their doors are 3 Punts, Artur Ramon Art, Die Ecke Arte Contemporáneo, Galería Contrast, Galería Zielinsky, Pigment Gallery, RocioSantaCruz and Victor Lope Arte Contemporáneo.By organising the city and its surrounding metropolitan area around the nuclei of Barcelona’s art scene (Ciutat Vella, Eixample, c/Trafalgar, c/Mèxic, Gràcia and Santa Eulàlia in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat), Barcelona Gallery Weekend will reformulate its routine urban networks, offering visitors the chance to experience the joy of discovery, critical observation and aesthetic pleasure; a different way of viewing the city, of coming into contact with art and getting to know those involved first hand.
Toni Catany, COSSIOL NUM 11, 1985. Courtesy Sala Parés.
ARTISTS
More than 60 national and international artists will exhibit a wide array of techniques, registers and formats. From avant-gardists to local, emerging artists, through renowned contemporary names, this year’s programme will spotlight the vibrancy of the city’s artistic fabric and its surprising variety.
Prominent names featured among the line-up include Peter Halley, a central figure in neo-conceptualism; Miguel Ángel Campano, National Prize for Plastic Arts in 1996 and renovator of Spanish painting; the conceptual Hans-Peter Feldmann and Dora García, who will accompany in a group show other great names such as the Portuguese Ana Jotta, the German Jochen Lempert and the Murcian painter Isidoro Valcarcel Medina, among others; Margaret Harrison, a pioneer in British and European feminist art who will share the room with Catalan artist Núria Güell and Peruvian artist María María Acha-Kutscher; Mabel Palacín, a multidisciplinary image researcher who represented Catalonia and the Balearic Islands in 2011 in the 54th Venice Biennale; Tony Catany, a leading figure in Spanish photography as well as Barcelona-born Xavier Ribas; Chilean artists Mario Navarro, moved by history and its exemplary political events, and Fernando Prats, multi-award winning artist who represented Chile at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Additionally, among the modern, Avant-Guard generations, our eyes are drawn to José Guerrero’s abstract expressionism, Óscar Dominguez’s surrealist paintings and renowned Catalan ceramist Josep Llorens i Artigas’ great masterpieces.
At the other end of the temporal scale, this year’s youngest artist, Bruna Ruiz Planella (Barcelona, 1996), will exhibit her paintings of expressionist reminiscence at the H2O gallery. Anna Dot, another example of young talent, who having won the Art Nou award in 2018 now returns to exhibit her work two years later at Bombon Projects, as part of a project aligned with her aesthetic that bridges the gaps between writing, performance and installation.
Likewise, other young and talented artists that have made a name for themselves in the art world and are worthy of mention include Virginia Rota, winner of the Nexofoto Award 2016; Eulàlia Rovira, a passionate artist with a meticulous performative and multimedia practice; and Paco Chanivet and Guillermo Ros, who will share a space in Espai Tactel.Toormix and are well known for fusing critical observation and humour.
This year’s selection includes other artists from the local scene who have also gained international status, such as Mar Arza, winner of the 2017 DKV award to the emerging artist for the best exhibition in Catalonia, whose work engages in an intense debate around the visual and material dimensions of language; English filmmaker Beatrice Gibson, two-time winner of the Tiger Award at Rotterdam’s International Film Festival for best short, winner of the Baloise Art Prize 2015 at Art Basel and nominated in 2013 for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women; Barcelona- born Lluís Barba, a prolific composer of contemporary digital mosaics; Barcelona- based Brazilian Pedro Torres, multidisciplinary artist whose practice centres around themes related to time, distance, memory, language and image; fellow Brazilian João Farkas, well-established photographer interested in the relationship between human beings and their context, analysing the impact of human existence of some regions in Brazil through traditions and festivities; also photographer Diego Ferrari will share a multidisciplinary exhibition project on the relationship between the human and the non-human realms with Rosa Galindo and Ruben Martin de Lucas; Biscayan Kepa Garraza, with his ironic and acidic vision, who explores how we build historical narrative, Miguel Ángel Tornero, winner of the prestigious ABC Photography Prize in 2003, the Murcian painter Miguel Fructuoso; and finally, also painter, the German-Estonian Paul Pretzer, with his ironic and playful figurative style with a surrealist edge.
CONTACT
Barcelona Gallery Weekend Susanna Corchia – Director [email protected] +34 687 207 943
