From a journey through the masterpieces of the history of comics to an approach to the Spanish portrait of the 19th century; from the private lives of Egyptian mummies to the genesis of Pixar characters, the close relationship between cinema and spies or a visit to the personal collections that artists such as Miró, Miquel Barceló, Georg Baselitz or Joan Hernández Pijuan treasured. The network of CaixaForum centers and the CosmoCaixa Science Museum are starting an ambitious season in which, in addition to the thirty exhibitions that will tour Spain, the main novelty is the launch of CaixaForum, a virtual platform that in its first year will house more than 120 projects (documentaries, series, concerts, podcasts, interviews, video art...), more than half of their own production or co-produced with important international institutions.
The new season of CaixaForum Barcelona, its oldest center and where you can still visit the Cinema and Fashion exhibition. By Jean Paul Gaultier (until October 23), it will start on September 28 with Comic. Dreams and History, an exhibition of its own production that reviews the entire history of the genre through 350 pieces, including masterpieces by authors such as Richard Felton Outcault, Winsor McCay, Milton Caniff, Hergé, Claire Bretécher, Alex Raymond, Will Eisner, Frank Miller, John Romita, Jack Kirby, Alan Moore, Moebius, Hugo Pratt, Quino or Francisco Ibáñez. Its curator is Bernard Mahé and the team of 9e Art Références, from Paris, and beyond a mere gathering of works, will try to underline the dual condition of comics as a tool for reflection on the present and the future, and as a powerful means of creation of parallel realities and imaginary universes.
Gods, magicians and sages is the title of the exhibition that will arrive in November and offers a more intimate knowledge of ten authors -and their creative processes- that are part of its Collection of Contemporary Art (Rosa Amorós, Miquel Barceló, Georg Baselitz, Luis Feito, Joan Hernández Pijuan, Manolo Millares, Joan Miró, Susana Solano, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Antoni Tàpies) through some of the objects they collected throughout their lives, many of which never left the private sphere.
Mummies of Ancient Egypt, an exhibition that can currently be seen in Madrid, delves into life in Egyptian civilization through the stories hidden by six mummies from very different periods – two priests, a married woman, an official and a child and a young man from the Greco-Roman period. It brings together 260 pieces including sarcophagi, mummies and objects of daily life – from food to beauty, music, healing practices or religion – from the British Museum (from November 30 to March 26, 2023).
For the first time in Spain, the 19th-century portrait is the subject of a large exhibition carried out in collaboration with the Prado Museum, from whose collections the works on display come, and with Vicente López, Federico de Madrazo, Eduardo Rosales, Ignacio Pinazo, Joaquín Sorolla and Ignacio Zuloaga as the main protagonists. The century of the portrait. The image of 20th century society can be visited from February 15 to June 4 and will explore the different facets of portraiture: from a symbol of power to a social phenomenon. The representation of the human figure, on a journey through time and different cultures, will be the subject of another ambitious exhibition, again in collaboration with the British, which will bring together 150 works from Ancient Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, as well as from Japan, Africa and Oceania, and will reflect on issues such as the ideal of beauty or the intention of the portrait. The human image. Art, identities and symbolism will be in Barcelona from July 4 to October 22.
The Barcelona center, which at the end of the year will inaugurate the Vertical Forest, a green door of more than 500 m2 that will connect the Montjuïc mountain with Barcelona in commemoration of its twentieth anniversary, will also offer two other exhibitions that have to do with cinema and the photograph. This is a monograph dedicated to the artist Alex Reynolds, who, among others, will premiere a new film project (from May 4 to August 20) and Expanded Visions, a journey through experimental photography led by the Center Pompidou, which will land with 260 works (from April 26 to August 27, 2023). Another novelty of the season will be an immersive experience that, following in the footsteps of Symphony, will use virtual reality to get closer to the instruments of an orchestra through Ravel's Bolero.
The Science Museum, fully integrated into the network of centres, to which some of its exhibitions have begun to travel, will present three new proposals: The colors of the world, a collaboration with National Geographic that wants to highlight the variety of tonalities and nuances that are part of nature (from February 14 to April 10); Pixar Science, which kicks off collaboration with the Boston Museum of Science and will expose the creative process of popular animation studios (May 16-September 3), and NanoCosmos. The latter has as master of ceremonies the artist and writer Michael Benson, who through the use of scanning electron microscopes obtains images of the reality hidden from the human eye that hides in the flora and fauna (as of June 2023).
The big premiere of the season, in collaboration with La Cinémathèque Française, will be Top Secret. Cinema and espionage, an exhibition that brings together real and fictional spies (Mata Hari, Carrie Mathison, James Bond or Edward Snowden), as well as a wide variety of objects, movies, series, drawings... with which it shows the extraordinary relationship that these characters have maintained with the seventh art throughout its history (from June to October 2023). Throughout the season, the aforementioned Expanded Visions (December 2022 to March 2023) and Gods, Magi and Wise Men (April-August 2023) can also be visited. And for the first time, the Madrid center opens its doors to science-themed exhibitions, such as the one dedicated to Nikola Tesla (from September to January) or Mamut. The giant of the ice age (from April to August).
Another twenty exhibitions will travel in the coming months through the different centers of the CaixaForum network, to which this year the one in Valencia has been added. Most have already been presented in previous seasons in Barcelona and Madrid, with exceptions such as 'El Jardín de Anglada-Camarasa', a new exhibition that will arrive in Palma de Mallorca in November and that, through paintings, drawings, engravings or clothing, explores the artist's interest in flowers.
