Barcelona Gallery Weekend, on a route through the art festival

While many of his friends were dying of AIDS and he himself, infected with HIV, faced the ordeal, artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman set about cultivating a garden on a patch of pebbles and scrub in the shade of a nuclear power plant.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
19 September 2022 Monday 12:13
15 Reads
Barcelona Gallery Weekend, on a route through the art festival

While many of his friends were dying of AIDS and he himself, infected with HIV, faced the ordeal, artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman set about cultivating a garden on a patch of pebbles and scrub in the shade of a nuclear power plant. From his refuge cabin in Prospect Cottage he made a desert bloom and wrote Modern Nature , a diary that goes from the garden to the hospital, where he died in 1994. Another sensitive, honest and ingenious artist, Fito Conesa, now takes up the last ten entries of that diary -from August 9 to September 3- to recreate his thoughts in a series of poetic videos and delve into his own experience, "in the anguish that I myself have been going through", to fill in the blank days with images created by Intelligence Artificial. Coinciding with the dates they were written, Conesa launched them on the Tik Tok platform and now brings them together in the House Of Chappaz gallery along with a beautiful and moving image, also generated by AI from a text, in which Conesa , in Jarman's shoes, has taken his bed out into the garden.

The piece, entitled Still-Life, is part of a collective exhibition at the Gràcia gallery and is one of the jewels that the Barcelona Gallery Weekend has been offering since yesterday, an event that marks the start of the artistic year and continues to bet on the celebration of galleries as knowledge-generating spaces, open to the public and a meeting place for both established figures and those artists who will one day form part of museums. Yesterday, the first day of the event that will last until Sunday -although many of the exhibitions will last much longer- some of the 120 international collectors who have traveled to the city could already be seen. But beyond its commercial aspect, the Barcelona Gallery Weekend, its organizers insist, the Art Barcelona association, wants to be a civic festival. There is much to see and to celebrate in 32 galleries that show works by 70 artists from 20 countries.

The Gallery Weekend has organized talks, tours, guided tours, snacks... Although, of course, everyone can design their own route based on their tastes and preferences. Dalí lovers will find an exceptional exhibition in the Mayoral gallery -it is not usual to see the work of the painter from Figueres in galleries: his great creations are in museums "and it is difficult to find things on the market that are worthwhile", says Jordi Mayoral- which brings together a selection of drawings, watercolors and paintings, including one of the sketches he made for Destino, the Disney animated film, which had not been released until 2002 and had hardly been seen since then. The price of these works ranges between 50,000 and 200,000 euros.

Under the title The Magic Carpet (this is how Joan Ponç portrayed Joan de Muga, flying over the world on a flying carpet), the Joan Prats Gallery pays homage to its founder, who died two years ago, with an ambitious exhibition that brings together a large part of the first works that its artists presented there (Miró, Calder, Tàpies, Brossa, Hernández Pijuan, Eulàlia Valldosera...) which is much like a journey through the art of the last century, with stops at his other two projects, Polígrafa and the missing Espai Poblenou, and an installation by Antoni Muntadas that, through images and objects, traces its history from the intimate and personal to its public aspect.

The event has also led to a series of visits by prominent Spanish artists (Guillermo Pérez Villalta, who presents work from his last years at the Sala Parés; Esther Ferrer, with her marvelous poems on prime numbers at Àngels Barcelona; Isidoro Valcárcel Medina with a journey through her entire career in ProjecteSD, or Susana Solano from Barcelona in Artur Ramon...) and the rediscovery of artists such as Ana Peters (1932-2012), who in the 1960s focused her critical gaze on female stereotypes in Spain Francoist (Marc Domènech).

Outside the circuit, but as part of the proposals for LAB 36, Bea Sarrias and Morrosko Vila-San-Juan present Working Mies at Cosentino City Barcelona, ​​an intimate and deeply sensory approach to the architecture of the Mies Van der Rohe pavilion from painting and the video, respectively.