La Virreina Center de la Imatge, one of the most active and stimulating centers in Barcelona, ??”jumps up the scale” in 2024, in the words of its director, Valentín Roma, with a program that includes large-scale international exhibitions such as the one it will dedicate in autumn to the Canadian Jeff Wall (Vancouber, 1946), one of the most influential artists and theorists of recent decades, whose work is disputed by museums around the world. The exhibition, the most complete retrospective that has been held so far in Spain (38 light boxes that will occupy an entire floor), will be curated by Jean-François Chevrier, the photographer’s top specialist, known in Barcelona for the exhibition Craigie Horsfield. . The city of the people, which he curated in the nineties together with Manuel Borja-Villel in Tàpies, and will be accompanied by the publication of an anthology of interviews and essay texts by Wall.
At the presentation of the new season, which also grows in budget and ambition, Rome was accompanied by the Councilor for Culture Xavier Marcé, who described the commitment of the Rambla space as “the best programming on the relationship between art, culture and thought “that the new Icub not only fully supports it but also expressed the will to continue strengthening it in the future. For this same season the budget has been increased by 200,000 euros, reaching 1,372,000 euros, an amount that according to Roma will not go to Wall’s exhibition – who has been personally involved in the project, contacting the museums of where the pieces come from and managing to reduce the cost of transportation to a minimum – but will be used to recover some of the lines that had given personality to the center and that due to the freezing of the budget had been somewhat blurred. Specifically, the production of work by contemporary artists will be promoted, the editorial policy will be reactivated, with publications such as the reissue of the design articles published by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán under the title Written by Jack the Decorator or the texts in Catalan by Joseph Beuys. , to whom he dedicated an exhibition.
“Our heritage is what we do,” said Roma, to explain that the fact of being able to present Wall, which places it on the international circuit of centers such as the Fondation Beyeler, the White Cube in London or the MAAT in Lisbon, They have to do with the own will of the artist who saw clearly that his place was La Virreina after seeing the exhibitions dedicated to Pedro Costa and John Berger. The latter attracted 58,000 visitors last year out of a total of 140,000.
As for the programming itself, La Virreina will host other relevant exhibitions, such as the one dedicated to the Brazilian artist Regina Silveira (from 11/15 to 3/30, 2025), one of the pioneers in experimentation with new technologies, of which his production since the seventies will be reviewed, with an important group of works made during the dictatorship of his country. Simultaneously, Mar Arza will present six projects, all of them unpublished and produced by the center, along with works that cover his entire career to date.
On the ground floor the exhibition A spiral ascension will be presented. Looking back from the end (from 6/14 to 10/13), a proposal by Raisa Maudit curated by Marti Manen, which will be replaced by a photographic exhibition by the Basque documentary filmmaker Clemente Bernard, which will be curated by Carles Guerra, former director of La Virreina. Finally, the Miserachs space will be reopened with a review of the work of the painter, art critic and visual poet Josep Iglésias del Marquet, by Eduard Escofet (from 11/15 to 3/30).
