Next Tuesday the 16th, at the Dry Martini cocktail bar on Aribau Street, with a special setup for the occasion, the exhibition ‘HOLA! Barcelona’, which includes 165 portraits taken by the Swedish photographer based in Barcelona María Espeus.
This exhibition had its first life in the long-awaited Institute of North American Studies, within the also long-awaited Photographic Spring, in March-April 1982. It has remained one of the best visual documents of Barcelona’s cultural life in the 80s and its images. They have often been reproduced separately in books and exhibitions by the author or about the period. It is presented again in its entirety in one of the premises of businessman Javier de las Muelas, witness to the moment when he has also published, for the first time, the catalog in its entirety.
How can an artist capture a collective moment in the history of culture? In Barcelona we have several notable examples. Starting in 1899, Ramon Casas made charcoal portraits of the “who’s who” of the turn of the century (the Rusiñol, Nonell, Maragall…) and also of the emerging ones such as Eugeni d’Ors. Four decades later, the Georgian painter Olga Sacharoff recorded in ‘El sopar de la colla’ the post-war gathering that met at the Agut or El Canari de la Garriga. The photographer Isabel Steva, Colita, inaugurated in 1971 in the Sala Aixelà the exhibition ‘La gauche qui rit’, about members of the so-called gauche divine.
Compared to the warmth of Sacharoff and the playful baroqueism of Colita, María Espeus practiced a cold and glamorous aesthetic. In ‘HELLO! Barcelona ‘gathered young professionals, the so-called moderns of the promising year 82: designers and cartoonists, editors, journalists, filmmakers, actors, couturiers, music promoters and musicians, cooks and others who simply circulated through the fashionable places.
Of that portrait, several of whose members, unfortunately and law of life, have already disappeared from the scene, we ask ourselves today: what did ‘HELLO! Barcelona’? A more open, vibrant and interesting metropolis than the current one? A varied incarnation of postmodernism of the 80s, with its dandyism, irony, aestheticism, distance from politics and desire to reorient the historical narrative in a more informal key?
Possibly it illuminates the fresh contribution of a generation that followed the gauche divine and the counterculture of the 60s and 70s and in many cases overlapped with them, which energized and changed the image of the city – which became known as the Barcelona of design, due to the work of many of those included in it – and probably had less influence than the gauche on the culture of its time.
And it also reflects a moment of great expectations, largely fulfilled with the Olympic renewal, which the Catalan institutions have not wanted to chronicle, while Madrid documented to the extreme all the elements of the very contemporary Movida.
There is a lot left to say about the ‘HELLO!’ generation. Barcelona’, and this initiative by Javier de las Muelas constitutes a first step. Today let us celebrate the resurrection of María Espeus’s talented project and with it a moment of our youth that, without being completely golden, had its certain magic.
AN EXHIBITION AND ITS PERIOD
On the occasion of the new exhibition of the portraits of ‘HOLA! Barcelona’, the entire catalog of images has been published for the first time, with texts by 17 authors, some of which we extract below.
JAVIER DE LAS MUELAS
Businessman, owner of the Dry Martini cocktail bar
One day in mid-2021, I don’t really know how, the image of that ‘HELLO!’ sign came to me. Barcelona’, the exhibition by María Espeus that was soon going to turn 40 years old. In the circumstances that we were experiencing those devastating days of covid and with the enormous sadness and concern that surrounded us, I thought it would be good to pay tribute, a tribute to their work, to that time, to those representative characters who gave rise to a unique moment from Barcelona. I should not miss the opportunity, I thought it was necessary to capture it in the current moment with the aim of reclaiming, with nostalgia or not, all those moments that formed during those years a lifestyle where the mixture, the miscegenation of different types of characters, recreated performances in bars and restaurants (Zeleste, Rodri, Xampanyet, Miramelindo, El Born, La Lola, Berimbau, Gimlet…), stages and sets where the great cinematographic scenes of our lives were filmed.
MARIUS CAROL
Journalist and novelist
In the eighties, Madrid tried to challenge it for cultural capital with the movement, but Barcelona responded by holding some Games that were the excuse for the city to rescue the sea and, with it, its place in the world. The exhibition “HELLO! Barcelona!” It was important because the sum of all the faces that were reflected in it resulted in the Barcelona of 1982.
ALICIA NUÑEZ
Designer
There were no networks. The information involved traveling, loading up on books in London, NY or Amsterdam and exchanging projects with each other. He never joined like then to set up projects or businesses. We met at night, in the few places that existed then, we told each other, we encouraged each other and we associated. We plotted together. We were all complicit against the conventional, against the mediocre. And that complicity was international. Wherever you traveled you found like-minded people who knew about Barcelona, ??its art and its clubs. We were united by ideas and creativity. And it was all to be done!
JORDI WAS
Photographer and writer
At the end of the seventies I met María Espeus and Peret. I think it was through Javier Mariscal. They had just arrived from Paris, attracted by the new air of freedom and creation that was breathed in Barcelona after the dictatorship. I met them in Marta Sentis’s attic, where I lived. We had a photographic laboratory set up in one of the rooms and, among many others, Copi, Alberto Cardín, Joan Baró, Nazario, Camilo, Pepichek and Ouka Leele, who was still called Bárbara, paraded through that floor.
I will never forget the screams of Ocaña dressed as Scarlett O’Hara, with a huge crinoline, invoking all the virgins of the Guadalquivir as he ran down the stairs after a bomb threat in the building. One day María and Peret visited us, and we had a creative crush. María was interested in my black and white photos of Indian rooms, full of smoke and chiaroscuro. I admired the artistry of her portraits. Also her technique. There was a reason she was Swedish and, therefore, methodical: she came from the country of Hasselblad! They were true professionals who worked hard and delivered orders on time, unlike many of us, who are more anarchic and lazy. It was a free and anarchic time. (…)
Time is a roulette wheel and a few protagonists fell by the wayside or ended up getting off. Many of the faces portrayed by María Espeus question us today in the same way as those of El Fayum because they speak to us of something eternal: they manage to transmit the inner fire and drive of young people wanting to assert themselves and take on the world.
LÁZER MOIX
Journalist
Drive and fun, youth with great expectations, emerge in many of the portraits that make up ‘HOLA! Barcelona! ‘These two words, and an exclamation mark, were enough for María, a Swede who passed through Paris and settled in Barcelona, ??to greet what would become her city. And, with them, she introduced a new class with a creative vocation, who was going to contribute the best she knew how to Barcelona’s transformation.
ANNA ALÓS
Journalist
Remembering those days is bird seed for endorphins: the urban transformation of the city and seeing from the audience how creativity emerged in industrial design, in graphic design, in fashion, in advertising, in architecture. And also remember some Ramblas of which to be proud because we felt they were our own.
JUANJO PUIGCORBÉ
Actor
After reading the names and reviewing the photographs, our first impression would lead us to conclude that this has been a vital, expansive and happy generation. But in a second, more detailed review, some doubts begin to arise: Could it not be, rather, a mixture-fusion of diverse people, of approximate ages, from different neighborhoods, interspersed with characters who connected the upper area with the Born, – crossing, of course, Las Ramblas – and stopping and spending the night – if necessary – in each of those three areas indistinctly? What fairy – or witch – stitched together such disparate neighborhoods and people, from night owls from Boccacio, or Dry, or Gimlet, to freaks from Drugstore David, rambleros or layetans? (…)
An unstoppable generation that rose like a great wave, that broke with force, art and salt; that ran to invade the shore until it caressed the feet of Parnassus, – where our predecessors sunbathed and cheered us on standing – and that then, inevitably, faded away in a race towards nothingness.
A happy generation, like so many others…
Just one certainty: we were young.
María Espeus HELLO! Barcelona
Dry Martini Aribau 162-166, from April 16 to the end of July.