Looking Back on Barcelona Gallery Weekend 2026

Just over one month on from the 12th edition of Barcelona Gallery Weekend, the city’s art season has been marked by a desire to stitch the past and the present together, and above all to reunite a city whose over-tourism has frayed the tender line between resident and visitor. During the weekend, alongside the excitement over what the city’s art scene had in store, Barcelona’s mood was one of careful planning. Above all, there was a clear intention to draw the kind of visitor to this event who comes to appreciate the city and its culture rather than simply consume it. These intentions even trickle down into the remodelling and restructuring of the very buildings that house the city’s collections. Most notable, are the expansions that were under way at MACBA and MNAC.

Poster for Barcelona Gallery Weekend 2026. Image credit: Barcelona Gallery Weekend.

At MACBA, building work that began in February 2025 is extending the museum into the neighbouring Convent dels Àngels, adding just over 2,100 square metres of gallery space and a viewing terrace, with the second phase due to start this month. The design leans on local materials and the natural thermal mass of its walls to cut its reliance on air conditioning. Once the work is done, the council intends to rethink Plaça dels Àngels itself, with more greenery, more shade, and more places to sit, fulfilling the obligations of wanting tourists to slow down and appreciate the city, whilst handing back the square to locals too.

These renewals are as human as they are architectural. In June, Valentín Roma returned to MACBA as director, a decade after serving as its chief curator and following nine years at the helm of La Virreina. Across the Gothic Quarter, the Museu Picasso, which opened in 1963 as the first museum devoted to the artist and the only one founded in his lifetime, has a new director in the art historian Rosario Peiró. She has promised a “living” collection, refreshed through new acquisitions and loans, though visitors will have to wait until around 2030 to see the full result. Between a museum looking ahead and one rereading its founding figure, the institutions set the tone for much of the art on display throughout the weekend: that of a city unwilling to choose between its history and its present.

The galleries carried this fervour onto the streets during Barcelona’s Gallery Weekend (BGW). Organised by the ArtBarcelona Galeries association, BGW ran from 17 to 20 September across 25 galleries with 23 in Barcelona and two in neighbouring L’Hospitalet de Llobregat. Every exhibition opened at once on the Thursday, with all the exhibitions being free to enter, allowing time for eager art fans to wander. Visitors were scattered from Gràcia to the Eixample, along Carrer de Trafalgar, out to Poblenou and over the city limits to L’Hospitalet, well beyond the Gothic Quarter’s well-trodden lanes. Also running alongside the main programme, for its second year was FLASH, a dozen exhibitions that existed only for those four days, rewarding anyone who made the trip in person. Although the FLASH programme has since ended, many of the shows are still open and several of the best reward a second look.

Reflecting the inventiveness of Barcelona’s art scene, Galeria Marc Domènech found a way to have its FLASH slot both ways. It gave the four days over to a single year in the career of Joan Claret, gathering a dozen canvases from 1959, the moment he turned his back on figuration. Claret committed to geometry at a time when Catalan painting was dominated by Informalism, so his choice was an act of dissent. Seen now, it shows how even the city’s historical art can feel urgent in the present. Visitors who missed it can see the exhibition's second instalment until 23 October, as the gallery now shows his paintings from 1960 to 1965.

The Great Gatsby at Sala Parés. Image credit: Cecilia Díaz Betz.

At Sala Parés, among the city’s oldest galleries, the past met the present through literature in an exhibition titled The Great Gatsby. Five painters were asked to read Fitzgerald again, letting the Art Deco glamour of the Jazz Age hover over their canvases while the darker side of the story shows through beneath it. Reappropriated culture was also on full display at ProjecteSD’s O Jogo da Glória (The Game of the Goose). The show brought together two artists of the same generation who move between high and low culture as easily as Gatsby’s green light carries across the bay. Ana Jotta, born in 1946, came to visual art in the 1980s after years in theatre and film. Allen Ruppersberg, born in 1944, made his name in 1969 by redirecting gallery visitors to a rented office full of pop-culture odds and ends. Both are compulsive collectors, but where Jotta chooses her found things out of affection, Ruppersberg rescues his from being forgotten. A mural by Jotta, made for the space, holds the show together like the board of the old game that gives it its name, and each work becomes a square on the way round. Much as the weekend itself held past and present in balance, the exhibition stops short of being a true collaboration. It unfolds instead as a long conversation, with enough distance between the two artists to give each room to speak.

Ana Jotta and Allen Ruppersberg at Projecte SD. Image credit: Cecilia Díaz Betz.

Where the works of Ana Jotta and Allen Ruppersberg at Projecte SD speak, those of Mariaelena Roqué at RocioSantaCruz sing in urgent operatic notes. Roqué, a Catalan-Venezuelan artist born in Tarragona in 1952, is best known for the Santos-Roqué company, which she founded with the musician Carles Santos. In the 1980s and 1990s it became one of the defining avant-garde groups in Catalonia, combining music, dance and performance. That association, however, has tended to overshadow her own work, and UnaDonaUna • AutoRetratRetratat sets out to correct the balance. Bringing together work from across her career, the exhibition focuses on the female body as a means of expression and resistance, whilst telling powerful stories around the taboos surrounding the exploitation of women within Latin America and mainland Europe.

Roqué does not work within a single discipline, but the photography on display is particularly strong, as in UnaOtraDonaUna (2019). In this black-and-white image, Roqué stares directly at the camera, her face framed by two soft, padded figures she holds up on either side. They are simple human silhouettes in black fabric, their arms and legs covered in fishnet mesh. Seen in the light of the exhibition’s themes, the image takes on a heavier meaning. The figures are faceless, as if their identities have been withheld, and their doll-like shape recalls childhood, while the mesh carries associations of the female body as something sexualised and on display. Held up like crosses, they suggest religious icons whose meaning has darkened, pointing to the silence that institutions, the Church among them, have long kept around abuse. Yet the figures only partly hide Roqué, and it is she who holds them. The image reverses the usual arrangement of portraiture, making her both the subject and the person controlling how she is seen. It is a clear example of her costume-character sculptures, in which the body becomes the material of the work, and of the UnaDonaUna project she has developed throughout her career to question the roles imposed on women by a patriarchal society.

Mariaelena Roqué, UnaOtraDonaUna, 2019. Part of Autoretratsretratats at RocioSantaCruz, Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 2026. Image credit: Mariaelena Roqué.

Roqué was not the only artist this past September to turn the meaning of soft materials into something harder. At Bombon Projecte, Mounira Al Solh takes activities long dismissed as women’s domestic pastimes, such as sewing, embroidery, hanging out the washing, and singing children to sleep, and makes them carry the weight of history. The exhibition’s title, Yalla Tnam, Yalla, comes from a lullaby familiar to children across Lebanon and Syria, roughly “come on, sleep, come on”. Al Solh writes it in Latin letters rather than Arabic script, so the sound is kept even though the alphabet changes. Al Solh’s central installation grew from a childhood memory. Kept awake by the bombing, the young Al Solh was allowed by her mother to cut small holes in her pyjamas and sew around them. This was not to mend them but to give her hands something steady to do while she was afraid. After the explosion at the port of Beirut in 2020, she returned to the gesture as a collective project with women in Lebanon and the Netherlands, some of them migrants, who cut and stitched their own nightclothes and shared their experiences as they worked. In the gallery, the garments hang pegged on washing lines. Each hole is ringed in coloured thread until it resembles a sun, an eye or a mouth. What began as damage has been turned, stitch by stitch, into decoration, even though that very same damage is kept on full display.

Mounira Al Solh, Nami Nami Noooom Yalla Tnaaam, 2023. On display at Bombon Projects, Barcelona Gallery Weekend 2026. Image credit: GJ van Rooij.

Saved for last, and tucked into the back of Chiquita Room, a small commercial gallery with locations in both Barcelona and Belgium, was Hook, Line and Sinker, a FLASH presentation of editions by the Dutch artist Pieter Laurens Mol (born Breda, 1946). Over the years he had favoured materials with weight, both literal and symbolic, such as lead, iron, sand and paper, using them to think about time, gravity, death and how fragile we as humans are. The intimacy of the back of Chiquita Room suited this, with only a handful of works and space to stand close to each one, viewers were allowed to rediscover Mol personally, with our present viewing becoming closely bound with his past works. His work Ja. (1975), a white sheet printed with the titular single word in bold black type followed by a full stop provides a thought provoking place to end our round up. Nothing else exists on the canvas apart from Mol’s signature and the date of the work, with the full stop turning what could be an everyday reply into a complete statement and work of art. Space which might be reserved for an image is now carried by the weight of a single syllable, an expression meaning ‘Yes’ which can be carried into the philosophy of the art weekend itself. Perhaps this short and unhesitating reply should be the one we carry with us. Across the weekend, Barcelona’s galleries said yes to the past, but never by simply preserving it. Claret’s canvases were restored, Gatsby was reread, Jotta and Ruppersberg’s found objects were given new lives, and Roqué and Al Solh turned old roles into new forms of resistance. Mol’s single word, printed half a century ago, asks the same of us now: to say yes to what came before while also allowing it to change.

Pieter Laurens Mol, Ja, 1975. On display at Chiquita Room, Barcelona Gallery Weekend 2026. Image credit Pieter Laurens Mol and Chiquita Room.

As Barcelona Gallery Weekend drew to a close, a more pressing question emerged as to where to find some much-needed respite from all this thinking about the past. The answer, as it turned out, did not take us far from art. Hotel ‘The One’ Barcelona, on Carrer de Provença in the Eixample, sits a block from Passeig de Gràcia and within walking distance of La Pedrera and Casa Batlló, and of several of the galleries in this review. Opened in 2017 as H10 Hotels’ first urban five-star Grand Luxury property, it has 88 rooms, 23 of them suites, but what sets it apart as a host for a contemporary art weekend is just how seriously it takes the art on its walls. Works by Antoni Tàpies and Joan Miró, two names at the centre of the city’s museum landscape, hang alongside pieces by Manolo Valdés, Yago Hortal and Mina Hamada. As with the weekend’s galleries, the established and the contemporary share the same space. Every bedroom also holds a work made specifically for the hotel by Fernando Prats, whose paintings trace the movement of birds in flight. After a weekend spent with Claret’s restored canvases and Mol’s single word, these birds in flight became fitting final images of something that is both of the past and of the present, set loose in motion, as we at last closed our eyes on Barcelona Gallery Weekend 2026.