Events

Upcoming events

Like a Dance of Starlings

MACBA’s exhibition Like a Dance of Starlings: MACBA Collection – Thirty Years and Infinite Ways of Being reflects on its 30-year journey through a metaphor of starling murmuration - a fluid, collective movement that mirrors how subjectivity and identity evolve.Rather than offering a chronological retrospective, the show is organised around “connective nodes”: themes like hybrid identity, spiritual worlds, community and ritual. It highlights how identities are shaped not in isolation, but through social struggle, shared experiences and constant transformation.The exhibition includes around 50 artists from the MACBA Collection - including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Àngels Ribé, Esther Ferrer and Claudia Andújar - plus newly acquired works. It also reaches beyond the museum: three works are displayed in schools via MACBA’s “Out of Storage” programme. The celebration of MACBA’s thirtieth anniversary is an apt moment to take stock and look back over how the museum’s past has shaped its present, as well as a welcome opportunity to appreciate how it has evolved.

Joaquim Gomis Transatlantic

Joaquim Gomis Transatlantic spotlights Joaquim Gomis at his most restless and modern: a young, self-taught photographer crossing the United States in the 1920s with little more than a camera and sharp visual instinct. These images reveal how quickly a new world was being built, and how quickly Gomis learned to see it.The photographs capture oil fields, the cotton industry, and the rise of early skyscrapers, alongside striking details from the ocean liner deck that carried him across the Atlantic. Together, they feel both documentary and experimental - compositions that anticipate the “New Vision” language of modern photography.Looking at them now, the series also reframes Gomis as more than a cultural figure behind Fundació Joan Miró (where he later became its first president): it’s a glimpse of a photographer already thinking in modern angles, textures and scale, making industry, travel, and transformation look unexpectedly cinematic.

Anna Moreno. The Third Twist

MACBA welcomes Anna Moreno: The Third Twist, an exhibition that uses utopian architecture as a time machine, asking what happens when big modern dreams meet messy reality. Moreno works like an artist-cum-detective, tracing how places built for the future age crack, and start telling different stories.At its centre is The Terminal Beach, a road-movie-style film that follows the remains of a nomadic settlement commissioned in 1979: an ambitious project in the Algerian Sahara designed during Ricardo Bofill’s utopian era, when his studio operated as a kind of interdisciplinary collective. The site was never completed, and Moreno uses its unfinished state to explore the tension between idealism and the aftermath of colonial modernity.The show brings together three recent works, linking Bofill’s projects with the speculative imagination of J. G. Ballard: part archaeology, part sci-fi mood-board, and a quietly haunting look at how the future can slip out of reach.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom is the duo’s first exhibition in Spain. It’s a powerful, research-led exhibition that treats sound, image and storytelling as forms of resistance. Based between New York and Ramallah, these Palestinian artists have been collaborating together since 2007 across image, sound, text and performance.At the centre of this exhibition is an immersive audiovisual installation shaped by their recent research into the resilience of former Palestinian prisoners, drawing on songs, poetry and everyday acts of resistance. Firsthand recordings and testimonies are layered with text and archival material, building a poetic but politically direct meditation on detention, freedom and survival under oppression. Presented alongside earlier works, the exhibition traces nearly two decades of practice and a sustained focus on memory, dispossession and struggles against oppression in Palestine and beyond.

The Last Days of Pompeii 2026

The Last Days of Pompeii turns ancient history into an incredible spectacle, using immersive projections, soundscapes, virtual reality and interactive installations to recreate the Roman city before disaster struck. It’s both an exhibition and digital theatre, inviting us to walk through streets, villas and public spaces as Pompeii comes back to life.The experience moves between archaeology and drama, with recreations of daily Roman life, the Villa of the Mysteries, gladiator battles and the looming eruption of Mount Vesuvius. There are also real artefacts and detailed replicas, grounding the digital effects in the material world of the ancient city.After success in cities including Madrid, London, Vienna and Beijing, the exhibition arrives in Barcelona as a fun and family-friendly journey through one of history’s most famous catastrophes. Tickets begin at 16.50 euros.

Chez Matisse

Chez Matisse. The Legacy of a New Painting is CaixaForum's deep dive into Henri Matisse. The exhibition tracks how he continued to reinvent painting, from his earliest self-portrait through to the radical freedom of his late works and gouaches. It widens the lens to show the dialogue around Matisse in 20th-21st century art: how his ideas about colour and the canvas as a pictorial surface reshaped modern painting and opened doors for later avant-garde artists. What you’ll actually see is a large selection of works (mostly from the Centre Pompidou), with Matisse pieces shown alongside artists he influenced, creating a conversation across generations. The route is organised into eight themed sections, moving from early modern movements (including German Fauves and Russian Neoprimitivists) through to the impact on American painting from the 1940s onwards.

Seaside Stretching at the beach

Swap your usual workout for a stretch session by the sea with Seaside Stretching at the Beach - a laid-back, all-levels class led by Marissa right by the waterfront.The format blends dynamic stretching, deep passive holds, and PNF techniques (a “contract-relax” method that helps you access a bit more range safely). It’s geared towards mobility, flexibility and body awareness, so it works whether you’re a runner, a desk-sitter, a gym person, or just someone who wants to move better.Expect a friendly, social vibe. You can show up solo, chat with other regulars, do the session with the waves in the background, and then you’re perfectly placed to grab a coffee, or stroll along the seafront. All you need to bring is yourself, a mat and a smile.

Kapwani Kiwanga

Kapwani Kiwanga’s Changing States brings one of contemporary art’s sharpest minds to Fundació Joan Miró for her first national retrospective. Winner of the 2025 Joan Miró Prize, the Canadian and French artist, who trained as an anthropologist, is known for installations that look formally elegant while quietly dismantling the power structures behind architecture, territory and the movement of materials.The exhibition explores how spaces are shaped by materiality, economic exchange and systems of control. It mixes existing works with a significant number of new pieces made for this show, while widening Kiwanga’s usual interest in architecture towards geology and deeper, non-human timescales.The programme includes conversations on colonial traces in ecosystems, dust, geology and ecological diaspora, including a dialogue between Kiwanga and geographer Kathryn Yusoff. The exhibition is in collaboration with TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary.

Out of Focus, another Vision of Art

Out of Focus: Another View of Art at CaixaForum takes blur, haze and visual imprecision and treats them not as accidents, but as one of modern art’s most revealing tools. The exhibition starts with Monet’s Water Lilies - a key moment in introducing blur as an expressive device - and uses that idea to rethink how later artists have represented perception and the instability of what we see.It traces the aesthetic roots of blur from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into modern and contemporary art, bringing together painting, video, photography and installation by figures including J. M. W. Turner, Alberto Giacometti, Mark Rothko, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Ruff, Alfredo Jaar, Soledad Sevilla, Christian Boltanski, Bill Viola and Mame-Diarra Niang. At its core is the politics and poetics of unclear seeing: how blur can unsettle certainty, multiply points of view and open up new ways of understanding images.

The Cult of Beauty

The CCCB’s latest exhibition, The Cult of Beauty, takes one of the most loaded ideas in culture and pulls it apart. Rather than treating beauty as something timeless or innocent, the exhibition looks at how aesthetic ideals have been built, enforced and sold across history by art, religion, medicine, politics and the market. It is adapted from a project first shown at London’s Wellcome Collection and arrives here with a clear critical edge.It moves from Antiquity to the present day and looks at skin, hair and flesh as sites of control, while also asking who gets excluded when beauty becomes a norm. It brings together artworks, historical documents, objects and contemporary installations, with names including William Hogarth, Laura Aguilar, Juno Calypso, Colita, Regina José Galindo, Lorenza Böttner, Arvida Byström and Sandra Gamarra.Tickets cost 6 Euros and it will be running until November.

Open-Air Cinema at the Palace 2026

Cinema under the stars gets the five-star treatment at El Palace, where the hotel’s Rooftop Garden transforms into one of the city’s most elegant open-air screens. With skyline views and a little old-school glamour, this is a long way from your average movie night.This summer’s lineup features romantic favourites and feel-good classics, with screenings including Grease, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Casablanca, The Goonies, Roman Holiday, Pride and Prejudice, Hidden Figures, La La Land, Mamma Mia!, Notting Hill, E.T., Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Devil Wears Prada. Films will be shown in the original version with Spanish subtitles.Settle into a hammock or premium deckchair, with freshly made popcorn and a St. Germain Spritz included. With limited capacity and panoramic views, it’s cinema as a proper summer evening out. Tickets start at 38 Euros. Book yours quickly as this one’s bound to sell out fast.

Talents Jazz a La Pedrera

Looking for something to do to while away the summer evenings? Talents Jazz returns to La Pedrera every Friday with one of the city’s most anticipated summer combinations: live jazz, Gaudí’s rooftop and the citywide views.The series champions emerging musicians and the 2026 edition doesn’t disappoint with a lineup that includes: Big Band Talents Jazz, Ara Martí Quartet, Mingus Reunion, Peñaranda-Garrido Quartet, Eclipse Group, Jolazz, JD Group, Edu Caballero, Ms. Floristan and Barcino Quartet.The experience also includes a visit to La Pedrera’s attic, where you can soak up Gaudí’s universe. Add a glass of cava, rooftop air and a programme curated with institutions including the Conservatori del Liceu, Taller de Músics and ESMUC, and you have a fun night out. Check out the full programme online and buy your tickets quickly before they sell out.

La Pedrera

May 29 – Jul 31

€42