Barcelona recovers a mansion on Ample Street for major international exhibitions

Barcelona will finally have a permanent space to host major international exhibitions.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
15 October 2022 Saturday 03:53
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Barcelona recovers a mansion on Ample Street for major international exhibitions

Barcelona will finally have a permanent space to host major international exhibitions. After two unsuccessful attempts at publicly owned venues -the Victòria Eugènia pavilion at the Fira de Montjuïc and the Sala Gran del Museu Marítim-, the place where the popular blockbuster exhibitions (prominent names and attractive proposals that become blockbusters ) will be an old neoclassical mansion on Ample Street, opposite Plaça de la Mercè. As its promoters have confirmed to La Vanguardia, the center is already very advanced and plans to start operating at the end of November.

The promoters of the initiative are Jesús Rodríguez, director of Evolucionarte, and the Reial Cercle Artístic de Barcelona, ​​chaired by Félix Bentz. Evolve yourself, a company with twenty-two years of experience and dozens of exhibitions behind it, landed for the first time in Barcelona in April 2021, then in association with the Italian promoter Arthemisia. His letter of introduction was a show by the Dutchman MC Escher at the Museu Marítim. That exhibition, which was visited by 55,728 people, had to be the first in a series of three - Marc Chagall and Claude Monet would follow - thanks to an agreement with the Drassanes Reials promoted by Xavier Marcé, the councilor for Tourism and Creative Industries . But the change in artistic orientation by the new director of the museum -Enric Garcia Domingo, who replaced Elvira Mata- and the air conditioning works in the hypostyle hall left the programmed exhibitions on stand-by.

This circumstance, together with the difficulty and high economic cost of having to musealize a space not designed for exhibiting each time, encouraged the promoters to look for a permanent space for the itinerant exhibitions they have in their portfolio and that include big-name names popular as those of Botero, Niki de Saint Phalle, Calder, Brueghel or Alphonse Mucha. They found the opportunity in a neoclassical building located at number 11 Ample Street. It was built between 1886 and 1900 by the architect Joan Martorell i Montells for the Mercantile Credit Society. After changing tenants several times (the last, until 2010, the Elisava School of Design and Engineering, attached to Pompeu Fabra), it was the subject of a thorough renovation by the Núñez i Navarro Group, its current owner.

According to Jesús Rodríguez, beyond the exhibitions, the idea we are working on is a multipurpose center, where symposiums, conferences, meetings are held... Let it be a true cultural engine and a long-term city project”. Located opposite Plaça de la Mercè, where Picasso's studio used to be, the 1,600-square-meter building retains its original decorative elements, including a large skylight supported from two floors above, which provides natural light throughout the building. space. The enclosure also has a main floor, in which a large noble room is located, and two upper floors.

This week Evolucionales has inaugurated an exhibition dedicated to Gaudí in CentroCentro, a space managed by the municipal company Madrid Destino where it has a continued presence. He usually works from private collections and large museum funds, such as the Picasso in Paris or the Whitney in New York, and contributes a percentage of the box office to the venues where he exhibits. In this case all the management will be totally private. "And that entails a risk but I think the bet is worth it," concludes Rodríguez.