December 2026
December puts the atom at the CCCB, from Hilma af Klint to Fukushima, and Aurèlia Muñoz's macramé at MACBA next door: two Raval neighbours, one trip on a short winter day. Anselm Kiefer fills La Pedrera, Ashurbanipal's Assyria is at CaixaForum, and MNAC's Wounded Militiaman leaves on the 31st. Seven picks.
CCCB – Centre de Cultura Contemporània de BarcelonaUntil 17 May
Close to 250 works follow the atom from 1890s physics to Fukushima, with art from Hilma af Klint to Yoko Ono, plus a section on Spain's nuclear plants. Aperture found it "starts out strong", though the documents "at times feel supplementary".
La Pedrera – Casa MilàUntil 24 January
Burned books, dried plants and lead fill the Opus Magnum vitrines, shown in Spain for the first time. About forty works from Hans Grothe's collection make this Kiefer's first Barcelona solo show, with a cycle for Robert Fludd.
MACBA – Museu d'Art Contemporani de BarcelonaUntil 2 May
Àguila Beix, a macramé eagle four metres wide, is one of more than 150 works, many never shown before, with loans from MoMA and MNAC. Also here: her 1980s bird-kites and a 4.75-metre homage to Bosch.
CaixaForum BarcelonaUntil 29 March
On the Borsippa stela, Ashurbanipal carries a basket of earth on his head: a king posing as a builder. More than 150 British Museum pieces, from Nimrud ivories to a basalt lion's head from Carchemish, fill in his empire.
Fundació Joan MiróUntil 28 February
Cassina's reconstruction of her 1929 Équipement intérieur d'une habitation closes the route. Spain's first Perriand show covers her work to 1955, including the 1936 photomural La Grande Misère de Paris and her 1932 Mallorca canoe trip.
KBr Fundación MAPFREUntil 17 January
Tupac Shakur for Vibe in 1993, and three decades of portraits from Imperial Courts in Watts: more than 126 large-format photographs, plus 300-odd Polaroid test prints from 1993 to 2008.
Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC)Closes 31 December
Francisco Mateos painted the canvas for the Spanish Republic's 1937 Paris pavilion; it is now badly deteriorated. Beside it hangs Pilar Rosado's AI reconstruction, and Revista Mercurio asked whether that "restores the militiaman or replaces him".
Museu d'Història de Catalunya
The Spanish Civil War through combatants' personal diaries: fears, routines, drawings, poems and songs, with the notebooks treated as an exceptional historical source.
Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC)
The MNAC's first major Josep Maria Jujol show, curated by artist Perejaume from the architect's newly donated archive, with works by Gaudí, Taut, Tatlin and Matisse.
Fundació SuñolFree
University of Barcelona Fine Arts alumni from the 'Cicle de Retorn' project in dialogue with alumni in the Suñol Soler Collection, including Ignasi Aballí and Susana Solano.
CCCB – Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona
The world's best-known photojournalism show returns: all 2026 World Press Photo winning images and multimedia projects from 42 photographers across six world regions.
Disseny Hub Barcelona – Museu del DissenyFree
A MATERFAD pop-up of eight fashion collections by Bau master's students, mixing biomaterials, 3D printing, light and craft to rethink fashion and nature.
Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC)
Francisco Mateos's Civil War propaganda painting, irreversibly deteriorated, is shown alongside AI-generated imagery that recovers its original visual impact.
Museu Blau – Museu de Ciències Naturals de Barcelona
Myth, life, extinction, de-extinction: animals we rarely see, from legendary beasts and extinct species to little-known living ones vital to healthy ecosystems.
Casa Batlló
Miró sculptures and prints and Joaquim Gomis's Gaudí photographs meet Tomorrow Bureau's AI, 3D-scan and animation installations. With the Fundació Joan Miró.
CaixaForum Barcelona
Works mainly from the "la Caixa" contemporary art collection that confront art history and tradition, titled after a Pasolini poem.
Museu Marítim de BarcelonaFree
Works and writings by ETSAB faculty trace how architecture, planning and landscape shaped daily life in Barcelona, with a focus on the sea.
Fundació Joan Miró
London artist and publisher Camilla Wills (Divided Publishing) takes over the foyer, part of the Espai 13 season from 6:12 pm to 5:48 pm.
MACBA – Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Edwin van der Heide's site-specific sound work, recording the ambient sounds of Plaça dels Àngels since July 2024 and playing them back as a shifting sonic portrait of the square.
MACBA – Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
First exhibition in Spain by Palestinian duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, centred on their audiovisual installation Prisoners of Love and its layered stories of resistance.
KBr Fundación MAPFRE
Retrospective of Dana Lixenberg's three decades of large-format portraits in the US, from Tupac and Biggie to Imperial Courts in Los Angeles and Shishmaref, Alaska.
MACBA – Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Recent works by Anna Moreno on utopian architecture, centred on The Terminal Beach, a road-movie film about Ricardo Bofill's unfinished 1979 settlement in the Algerian Sahara.
KBr Fundación MAPFRE
Sixth edition of KBr's showcase of emerging photographers from Barcelona's schools: Sara Bravo, Elena Bulet i Llopis, Meghan Mathews and Luca Gaetano Pira.
Fundació Joan MiróFree
Barcelona artist Victor Ruiz Colomer closes the Espai 13 season with work driven by thermodynamics and how Sert's building shapes movement through it.
La Pedrera – Casa Milà
Barcelona's first major Anselm Kiefer show: around forty paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs and artist's books, mostly from Hans Grothe's collection, on memory, matter and knowledge.
Museu de la Música de Barcelona
The sound sculptures of Bernard and François Baschet, 1950s inventors who built electricity-free instruments from steel, aluminium, cardboard and inflatable cushions.
Fundació Joan Miró
Miró's newly donated drawing Untitled (1930) shown with his sketches for the series, likely inspired by Georges Bataille's essay 'Le Gros Orteil'.
Museu de la Música de Barcelona
For Casals' 150th anniversary, the first show of the archive from his last 18 years in Puerto Rico (1955–73), founding institutions, conducting and composing.
Museu de la Música de Barcelona
Installation by Gerard Valverde Ros and Marc Villanueva: a magnetic instrument for remixing recordings of Barcelona's 1989 Contemporary Music Week.
Fundació Joan Miró
Spain's first exhibition on Charlotte Perriand, the pioneering modernist designer from Le Corbusier's atelier and a lifelong friend of Sert and Miró.
Museu Picasso de Barcelona
How Picasso's cubist space shaped modern architecture, from Guernica's 1937 pavilion and his Barcelona architects' college friezes to his influence on Le Corbusier.
Disseny Hub Barcelona – Museu del Disseny
Rediscovers Asunción Bastida (1902-1995), the Barcelona couturier who was the only woman in the top circle of Spanish haute couture, showing collections from Madrid to New York.
Disseny Hub Barcelona – Museu del Disseny
A survey of André Ricard, a pioneer of contemporary Catalan design, focused on everyday objects conceived as tools serving people and society.
Disseny Hub Barcelona – Museu del Disseny
For its centenary, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's 1926 Frankfurt Kitchen and how industrial design reshaped housework, women's roles and the modern home.
Disseny Hub Barcelona – Museu del DissenyFree
For the Aurèlia Muñoz Year, three early textile works from the collection: the 1961 tapestry La Barcelona gòtica and two 1962 screen-printed jute table covers.
Disseny Hub Barcelona – Museu del Disseny
A survey of contemporary digital art by artists working with computational technologies, from generative art and live creation to critiques of the invisible infrastructure of the digital world.
CaixaForum Barcelona
Assyrian treasures from the British Museum trace the life of Ashurbanipal (669-631 BC): warrior, scholar, lion hunter and builder of a great library.
Museu Marítim de BarcelonaFree
The story of the Drassanes Reials from their 13th-century origins under Peter III to today: the world's largest surviving medieval shipyards.
Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC)
Ona Balló's sound installation in the Romanesque galleries, playing recordings from six Pyrenean churches whose apse murals now hang in the museum.
MACBA – Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
A full survey of textile artist Aurèlia Muñoz, from early collages and embroideries to unseen large macramé structures, her iconic kite-sculptures and late handmade-paper installations.
CCCB – Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona
20th- and 21st-century art responding to the atom and the bomb, from early physics and mysticism to nuclear protest. Adapted from the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris show.
MACBA – Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Collection display tracing Video-Nou and the Servei de Vídeo Comunitari, a collective that used video as a tool of political counter-information in Catalonia from 1977 to 1983.
MACBA – Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Collection display of videos by artists from around the world, donated by the Han Nefkens Foundation, where documentary and poetic moving images are shaped by texture, sound and materiality.
MACBA – Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Screenings of Pere Portabella's films from the MACBA Collection for his centenary: radical cinema made under censorship that rejects linear narrative and treats form as a political stance.
CosmoCaixa
Australian Museum show on 450 million years of sharks: ten life-size models from great white to Helicoprion, a megalodon jaw to touch, interactives and an oceanarium.
A short note now and then when something new opens worth your time.
