Barcelona has come to be synonymous with the architecture of Antoni Gaudí. Today, the tourist can not only see the Catalan architect’s fantastical designs from the street as they navigate Ildefons Cerdà’s celebrated grid, but many are now ticketed and open to the public. One of the most recognisable and photographed façades of the city is that of Casa Batlló, a decorative, sinuous, and spectacular residential building topped by one of the most remarkable rooftops. Over the last two decades Casa Batlló has been increasingly opened to the public and now is one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions.

Such celebration, let alone access, was not always the case and a new exhibition at Casa Batlló speaks to the mid-century period when the architecture of Gaudí was somewhat less central to the city story. The project connects the architect with two other creatives who were central to both the cultural narrative of the city as well as the re-recognition of Gaudí’s work across the Catalan capital.


Ensconced within a recently opened suite of exhibition spaces within a floor of the property that had, sadly, lost most of its original fixtures and fittings, Gaudí–Miró–Gomis: Deconstructed looks at the work of Gaudí alongside and in relation to the practices of well-known artist Joan Miró and perhaps less well-known photographer Joaquim Gomis. A reworking of an exhibition held at Fundació Joan Miró in 2019, it seeks to show how the practices of each artist interconnect through time, geography, and idea.

Like Gaudí, there is a great deal of Miró’s work to enjoy across Barcelona beyond the Fundació he set up to carry his work into the future. The artist, known for his primary colour expressionist paintings but with a nuanced practice that goes far beyond, was a great fan of Gaudí’s work. Born in Barcelona in 1893, just over a decade after the first stone of the Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família was placed into the ground, Miró grew up in a city in which the work of Gaudí was loved, his architecture commissioned by the richest and grandest of the city, including industrialist Josep Batlló who in 1904 engaged the architect to reimagine a property on the fashionable Passeig de Gràcia he had recently purchased.

The son of a goldsmith and watchmaker, Miró wasn’t meant to become an artist, but showing a love from a young age he went to Valencia to study fine art and then travelled to Paris, despite always retaining a passion and interest in his home region. When younger, his style jumped around from realism to Fauvism to Cubism as he developed his artistic personality, but when it landed within what was a growing language of Surrealism his talent took off. Throughout his works, Miró used nature as a key element of his practice, both in inspiration and canvas, once proudly proclaiming he painted directly onto boulders so to compress his artistic rendering directly onto the landscape he was inspired by.




Gaudí also drew from nature in remarkable ways, so it is no surprise that first growing up then as an emerging artist, Miró was influenced by the architect’s projects. While 40 years younger they never properly met, it is believed that in order to improve his life-drawing skills, the architect attended an evening class Miró coincidentally also studied at Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc in Barcelona. Later in his life this respect was visually articulated through his Gaudí Series (1975-79), a series of 21 engravings he created with the help of Joan Barbarà.

A 1950s UNESCO for murals in Paris in collaboration with ceramist Josep Llorens Artigas and an inspiration-seeking visit to Park Güell led to Miró more deeply considering the impact of Gaudí’s work on his practice.

Born in 1902 in Barcelona, Joaquim Gomis Serdañons is perhaps less well known. Although as a young accountant he left Catalonia to work in Europe and the US, he never lost his love for photography and Catalonia. While abroad, he developed his photographic interests in urban landscapes and architecture, slowly developing a respect in artistic circles. After Gaudí’s death in 1926, his architecture had fallen from fashion, considered excessive and overly-baroque, so it was a surprise to Gomis’ acquaintances when he first set about properly documenting the architect’s output.

Through the 30s and 40s, Gomis persisted in recording Gaudí’s work as part of his wider practice, even though it had become somewhat neglected. Many of the images made at this time are presented in the Casa Batlló exhibition – a few in a physical hang in one of the gallery spaces, and many hundreds more presented digitally, including most of the images presented in a remarkable series of square-format ‘fotoscop’ books created in collaboration with art promoter and close friend of Joan Miró, Joan Prats. Gomis, too, had grown to become a good friend of Miró, documenting his works and also reproducing them in a fotoscop publication.




The exhibition is small, but draws connections through the protagonists neatly. A wall-chart presents the three overlapping chronological biographies that help set out cultural overlaps and as well as Gomis’ works presented physically and through projection, a display vitrine presents six of Miró’s smaller bronze sculptures. While Gaudí is only represented in the exhibition through the eyes of others, visitors to the exhibition also have the whole of Casa Batlló to explore to see the genius’ creativity.

Casa Batlló Contemporary, who run the new exhibition spaces and the building’s ongoing cultural projects, take a keen interest in the digital – they also offer an ongoing annual façade-mapping commission and an overly-Instagrammable 360 degree digital room In The Mind of Gaudí by Refik Anadol. The digital is also central to the exhibition offer, and here employ London-based tech agency Tomorrow Bureau to add a fourth component to the mix.

Tomorrow Bureau sought to examine the source works as if they were unknown worlds to be explored. One of their two outputs, Miró – Unearthed, treats the sculptures in the room as asteroids, micro-imaging allowing an exploration of them as an alien surface which while rapid and hard to grasp does offer a new treatment to the materiality and surfaces of the works. Their second intervention takes Gomis’ images of Gaudí's architecture and feeds them through a specifically-created AI to create new aesthetic outcomes as a test of how technology may play with the archive.




The stories and works of Gaudí, Miró, and Gomis are individually fascinating, and there is benefit to reading them as a knot rather than individual, separated strands. Culture is, after all, a verb more than a noun, and there is value to recognising process, interconnectedness, and influence, even when the artists in question didn’t (or at best barely) met. Ideas and aesthetic carry through, and the intent here is to show now only how such influence occurs not only as historical act between practitioners, but onwards through to new makers and technologies, looking back to always look forward.