One of the names that cannot be missed when talking about Spanish art in the 20th century is that of Pablo Picasso. And in the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the painter’s death, the Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya (COAC) wanted to be present with Picasso, urbanism and the synthesis of the arts, an exhibition that shows the relationship between art, architecture and urban planning.
The link between the artist and the COAC is not minor. The building, designed by the architect Xavier Busquets, houses an emblematic concrete mural of the creator of cubism on its almost 60 meter facade. A work presented in 1962 that perfectly captures the relationship between art and urban planning, and that draws the attention of hundreds of passers-by walking through the Gothic Quarter.
The exhibition, which can be visited between November 17 and February 11 in the Plaça Nova building, takes a historical tour from 1946 to 1979, in which it presents the context that led to the union of architecture and the arts, and which made possible the friezes made using a pressure sandblasting technique, which allowed the work of Pablo Picasso to be embodied in concrete together with the Norwegian painter Carl Nesjar.
The exhibition brings together the historical records of the creative process of Picasso and Nesjar, and the photographic captures of buildings such as the church of Ronchamp, by Le Corbusier, and the habitable sculptures of André Bloc, which represent the synthesis of architecture and the arts, compiled in a journey of 2,500 kilometers and a week made by the photographer Manolo Laguillo and Fernando Marzá, curator of the exhibition.
The exhibition, which includes tactile models of Picasso’s friezes for the visually impaired to experience, is a testament to a time when architecture sought to move away from pure functionalism and explored what other arts could contribute- li, a movement that resulted in collaborations such as the murals that remain today in front of the COAC and that over the years have enriched the city’s urban environment. “These murals are a testament to the imagination of two great artists who remember the ability to change the urban environment through art”, says Guillem Costa, dean of the COAC.
