There can’t be many cities in the world that host more cultural festivals than Barcelona. Back in 2023, we visited MODEL architecture festival (see 00119), but it’s also home of LOOP for video art, Grec for theatre and performance, Sant Jordi for literature, Sónar for electronic music, amongst several others. The Catalan capital loves a pop-up cultural event, and for the last 12 years Barcelona Gallery Weekend has been the annual moment for the city’s contemporary art to be shown in full force.

Organised by ArtBarcelona, it has grown year on year with the 2026 offer comprising 25 galleries and institutions, from small spaces for experimental practice through to world famous museums. In a city of such transience, experimentation, and festival culture it is not an easy task to shed light upon the city’s commercial art sector. In Spain, the art market tends to reside in Madrid, home not only of international capital and a stronger collector base, but also where ARCO contemporary art fair has taken place annually since 1982.



recessed.space was invited to the 2026 edition of Barcelona Gallery Weekend as part of an international press visit. Barcelona does luxury tourism very well. We were put up in The One hotel, with an immaculately designed sauna, a rooftop lounging pool with views across the city and coast, is a stone’s throw from boutique stores and the most well-known Gaudí buildings (see 00328), and even has art from the likes of Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies throughout. In fact, a series of Fernando Prats works, Paintings of Birds for a Private Room, decorate every one of the 5-star hotel.

Barcelona is an incredible city for a visitor, perhaps too incredible. Such a hotel as The One is not unusual for a world city, but the rate at which a place has been turned into tourist accommodation is perhaps unrivalled with the consequence that it can be expensive to live, or for a small gallery to emerge and grow. Barcelona has become a case study in tourist-led gentrification, how value from it may fall inequitably amongst residents, and who the city is for.




Two experimental galleries choose to run their operations from L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, a separate city with its own municipality, behind the Olympics ’92 hill of Montjuïc, but subsumed into the vast grid that is urban Barcelona. Off the beaten track for the typical international tourist, it offers spaces such as Galería Alegría. The building was once an iron door manufacturer, before that a marble-cutter, and before that a rag workshop, but since 2013 a space to explore conceptual and experimental edges of contemporary art.

In it, a collaborative presentation from two artists, luisbisbedelafuente and Jacobo Castellano, fill the atmospheric rooms. Material is stretched from floor to ceiling (perhaps a nod to the building’s former function), ad hoc timber sculptures seem precarious, the future of some plastic tape punctured by a cactus it wraps around has even more precarity. The works from both artists respond to and play with the space, while marks on the floor from stone-cutting machinery and a ceiling-height timber-box vent to clean ragtrade air are traces of former occupants that sit well amongst the new occupants.




Nearby gallery etHALL was opened by Jorge Bravo in 2011, but in a borrowed part of another space in Raval, central Barcelona. It outgrew the space it had, but by 2018 the diverse and experimental Raval was gentrifying at a pace, and so Bravo relocated to L'Hospitalet de Llobregat and the expanded opportunity a former industrial warehouse offered.

For Gallery Weekend, etHALL was showing work by Eulàlia Rovira and Sergio Prego. Co-representing Spain at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Prego creates sculptures of industrial materials that could be confused for being a part of the host architecture – here, this includes a fountain formed building site plastic sheeting and beeswax sculptures, works that the artist want to exist “like a parasite” in the gallery space.

There were once more similar spaces in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, but such are the pressures of neoliberal market forces in the city that it is not such an easy environment to maintain such explorative projects. Some galleries, however, left the area in order to expand into new sites with more market exposure in one of a few clusters. One such area is Passatge Mercader, a narrow orange tree-lined street cutting through the centre of Ildefons Cerdà’s cut-corner blocks.

We visited three neighbouring galleries, each with different but specific architectural angles to their projects. ProjecteSD paired Ana Jotta and Allen Ruppersberg, both born in the mid-1940s. Ruppersberg creates collages from pop culture, pulling from postwar US culture in all forms to create scrapbook-esque assemblages. Portuguese Jotta, however, was invited to create directly onto the gallery’s walls, and here has created a wrap-around mural that ties the irregularly-formed space.




Galeria Zielinsky was showing architectonic sculptures by Amparo Tormo. Black and white works read as redacted plans and sections, a geometry of planes and voids that could be diagrams, but without revealing diagrams of what. 3D works continue the theme, conjoining materials including aluminium, iron, MDF, and stainless steel with the form of architectural detailing.

Next door, Galeria Art Marc Domènech was set up in 2012 in a unit that had been a clothes shop. Suitably, for a gallery focusing on 20th century art, the interior décor retains some wonderful modernist wooden panelling and furniture. In fact, it was when refurbishing the space that stacks of old exhibition leaflets were discovered under a built-in round seat, revealing that the space had been a gallery previously in the 1970s.

Works by Catalan abstract painter Joan Claret, all made in 1959, were neatly presented throughout, most of them seen in public for the first time. Having passed in 2014, all the works come from the artist’s own collection, and from an important period just after a trip to Paris and the year of his first solo exhibition. Bringing ideas of geometry and construction back from France to Barcelona, this body of works was followed immediately by a further presentation of Claret’s works from his next five years.




More contemporary, experimental galleries are clustered in a few streets close to Plaça d'Urquinaona, making for an exciting few hours for any visitor to step away from international tourism and fall into the strange crevices of artists’ minds. At Prats Nogueras Blanchard, local artist Lucía C. Pino has a solo exhibition of sculpture, archive, and memory. Industrial machinery-looking constructions fill the floor, made with materials sourced from scrapyards, bins, and antique shops look like security structures: fences, shopfront-barriers, or barricades. Or, perhaps they are storage structures, for either an materials store, museum archive, or market. All these possibles slip into one another, and a series of architectural detail photographs – interrupted by a fantastic bum – add more slip to the mix.

At Dilalica, Mikel Escobales, it gets slipperier. Here, we don’t even know what is work and what is gallery. The interior of the space is scratched, worn, and riven with small holes, all traces of previous exhibitions and installations. Into it, Escobales’ has placed works that camouflage. Two metal poles protrude and three glass sheets, with perfectly cut holes, hang from them. The gallery – from front and back – reflects and they seem incidental, drawing attention away from the work to the space itself.




It all seems a long way from the tourist tat nearby, including a Banksy ‘museum’. It was not always though, the hypertourism of Barcelona may have blanded out much of its offer, but a 20 minute walk through the Gothic Quarter and you will chance across Sala Pares, the oldest art gallery in Spain. It is still showing interesting contemporary work, as it was in 1877 when it completed its evolution from an art store to a gallery. Picasso showed here, and during the ‘late 19th century gold rush’ period and the growth of a Catalan bourgeoisie it became central to an emergent local cultural approach.

It has three spaces in a wonderful, simple architectural shell, and on the ground floor the magical realism of Guillermo Pérez Villalta creates geometric, uncanny, enticing worlds. With nods to di Chirico, Dali, Escher, Kandinsky, Magritte, and a million others, these tableaus, set pieces, and places are not derivative, but a dreamlike confusion of everywhere all at once.




Despite its history, heritage, and quality, galleries such as Sala Pares, and all the others mentioned before, may struggle to attract the tourist footfall of the big institutions, such is the way Barcelona’s cultural image is shaped. Gallery Weekend is in some way trying to counter that image of a city of festivals and institutions, or at least find a way to show that there is a wider and deeper cultural read of the place.

That said, some of the institutions are important, and nearly all are in processes of transformation to also work towards the city looking inwards and more intelligently at what it has, rather than shouting loudly outwards. Nearby, the Picasso Museum has a new Director. Rosario Peiró Carrasco said she wants to “take the museum back for citizens rather than tourists” and to “recapture the story of the 1958 museum as one for the people of Barcelona”. It’s a grand ambition, and one which will involve subtle reimagination of the architectural spaces and navigation as well as curatorial shifts and a new pricing policy.




As well as the few big hitters that tourists queue up for, more space will be afforded to “deconstruct Picasso”. He has, after all, a complicated relationship to certain issues such as gender and race, and so the new Director is setting out to “curate a feminist programme with women artists” with special exhibitions to which local residents will have heavily reduced entry price.

MACBA, the Richard Meier spaceship that landed in the working class, ethnically diverse Raval district, has also never really been adopted by locals as a cultural space of their own. That may be because of the imposing architecture, a programme never designed to focus on local but instead pull the world’s best to the city, or just that it was a harbinger of tourism and gentrification into a compact and rooted community – or, more likely, all three.



There are plans to address this through an extension, one that more gently relates to the place and surroundings than Meier. Designed by Barcelona firm HARQUITECTES with Christ & Gantenbein. The new building, facing MACBA across the skateboarder-filled Plaza des Angels, reworks a former chapel with infill additions designed to sit in harmony at a more human scale.

Ground floor spaces will be free for all, with some unique gallery spaces that open onto the Plaza, while the more traditional white cube galleries deeper in the plan can be accessed either internally or via an external sculptural staircase, meaning visitors can punctuate their gallery visit with a reminder of the urban context. Its design is intended to have many “between spaces” allowing curators and visitors both to have a sense of play and experience.




MNAC – the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya – has also been a place that has struggled, both for an identity locally and internationally. Opened in 1934, just before the Civil War, in the grand neoclassical Palau de les Belles Arts, built for the 1888 Universal Exhibition on Montjuïc hill, it was to hold all Catalan art from Romanesque church paintings through to the modern art of the day. However, in the years that passed its purpose, legibility, and functionality has become diluted.

It too is building an extension to resolve these issues, offer space for existing and expanding collections, allow a new choreography through the spaces that allow for an understanding of chronology of Catalan culture, and allow for new space for local art for the people of Barcelona. It is a grand ambition, overseen by Director Pepe Serra and it may all yet get disrupted by forthcoming local elections in a febrile political atmosphere.

If it all comes to pass then by the end of the decade the nearby Palau Victòria Eugènia, a vast exhibition space also from the Universal Exhibition, will be transformed into grand halls of contemporary Catalan art donated or loaned from local foundations and collectors. It will all then be connected to the main Palace by a new tunnelled passage with its own interruptions and presentation spaces. It is all to a design by the same architects as MACBA, Swiss firm Christ & Gantenbein. It’s polite, sensible, and has some interesting touches in the intent, but it is an incredible shame that both main institutions in such a city – one known for eclecticism and surprise – selected the same, mannered firm following international competition.

While excited, Serra pours cold water on the 2029 opening date. It is a huge project and there are many moving parts beyond the anticipated €112m budget. If it all goes to plan, however, he thinks it will be a critical piece in the city’s jugsaw and solve a problem for MACBA in that it will no longer be seen by locals as having to represent contemporary Catalan practice, and with new MNAC spaces for this, MACBA’s mission can be free without baggage.



There is a lot going on in Barcelona culturally. It is not ordinary city for galleries and institutions due to the rapid and intense hyper-touristification and associated rise in cost of living. In 2015, the left-wing Barcelona En Comù, led by Ada Colau, won municipal elections in large part on the promise of building a new model of tourism in Barcelona, questioning whether the desire for ever-larger numbers of tourists can be sustained without damaging the meaning of the place, turning cherished heritage into a tourist commodity, and generally push a Disneyfication of complicated and meaningful histories.

From tiny experimental spaces to enormous international behemoths of culture, Barcelona Gallery Weekend is designed to help with the nuanced cultural position in the city – to present internationally and raise awareness as a place of art market, but also support emerging local experimental culture and work to rebalance the lopsided dominance of tourism over citizenship.