CaixaForum, the Cultural and Social centre of La Caixa’s Community Projects, is housed in what was once a factory, designed in the Art-Nouveau style by the architect Puig i Cadafalch, and it has become one of Barcelona’s most dynamic, active and lively cultural centres. Through visits to the building, a gem of Barcelona’s industrial legacy, and to the exhibitions devoted to artists such as Dalí, Rodin, Freud, Turner, Fragonard, Hogarth and Cartier-Bresson, and thanks also to the concerts, lectures, literary events, multimedia art and many other activities put on there, CaixaForum has become a prominent beacon in the life of Barcelona.

HIGHLIGHTS NOVEMBER 2007 – SEPTEMBER 2008

ARCHITECTURE

• Art Nouveau and the modern age. Visits to the former Art-Nouveau Factory – NEW

An area permanently devoted to exploring the details hidden behind the walls of CaixaForum, the one-time textile factory designed by Puig i Cadafalch – a unique urban example of industrial Art Nouveau. A permanent exhibition rounds off the tour of the building, bringing us insights into the building and the figure of Josep Puig i Cadafalch, one of the most prominent architects working in the Art Nouveau style along with Domènech i Montaner and Antoni Gaudí.

EXHIBITIONS

• Passionate about drawing
  From Poussin to Cézanne. Masterpieces from the Prat Collection
  Until 9 December.

The Prat Collection is one of the most important private collections of French drawings from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The works exhibited – a selection of 100 drawings by artists such as Watteau, Jacques-Louis David, Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, Degas and Seurat – follows a chronological path taking us from Mannerism to Impressionism.

• Candida Höfer in Portugal
  Until 6 January 2008.

Large-format photographs taken by the German photographer Candida Höfer in Portugal in 2005 and 2006. They portray interiors (libraries, theatres, churches) devoted to social interaction, though in her shots they are often shown devoid of any human presence.
The exhibition was organised by the Portuguese foundations Fundação de Arte Moderna e Contemporânea-Colecção Berardo, the Fundação Centro Cultural de Belém and our Fundació ”la Caixa”.

• The canvas is the screen
  15 December 2007 to 15 January 2008.

This cycle was produced by the Madrid museum Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) and brings together works that relate moving pictures to a key artistic medium: painting. All the works share a common characteristic: they evoke the formal qualities and conceptual concerns of painting, as well as the history of painting. In this spirit, a wide-ranging programme of videos will be shown, by Julien Devaux, Jos Stelling, Yu-Sheng Ho, Pieter-Rim de Kroon, Barbara F. Freed, Jean-Charles Fitoussi, Vincent Monnikendam, Malcolm Le Grice, Ian Helliwell, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, Joan Wallace, Alibhe Ni Bhriain, Jacco Olivier, Ellen Harvey, Magdalena Fernández, Takehito Koganezawa and Marcello Mercado.

• Charles Chaplin
  19 December 2007 to 27 April 2008.

This exhibition is a production by NBC Photographie, Paris, with the support of The Chaplin Archives and the assistance of Jeu de Paume, Paris, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. It is curated by Sam Stourdze, the author of Charlie Chaplin. A Photo Diary (Göttingen, 2002), and Christian Delage, the author of Charlie Chaplin. La Grande Histoire (Paris, 1998) and other books. The exhibition will be staged at CaixaForum Barcelona and will subsequently be put on at CaixaForum Madrid, CaixaForum Palma and the Social and Cultural Centre of Fundació ”la Caixa” in Tarragona. The selection exhibited offers a portrait of this legendary figure, and takes visitors on a tour of his career as an artist through visual materials, arranged in five chapters: The Character, The Film-Maker, Fame, Commitment and Discourse, all as seen through photographs, films, stills, plays, objects, magazines from his own day, etcetera.

• The Etruscans
  31 January to 4 May 2008.

During the course of the sixth and fifth centuries BC, an original monumental architecture style emerged in Etruscan cities, taking in both the public sphere, with the erection of sacred buildings richly decorated in multi-coloured terra-cotta, and the private sphere, with the coming of houses with articulated structures and luxurious decors. The layout of the cities is seen in the arrangement of their necropolises. Those “cities of the dead”, which typically featured broad avenues lined with huge chamber tombs as in Cerveteri, or funerary chambers with a wealth of painted decorations as in Tarquinia, or full-blown urban structures as in Orvieto, reflect the sumptuousness of real-life rooms in their architecture and interior ornamentation, thus giving us a window onto a civilisation that thrived over two thousand five hundred years before our own time.

Over 250 exhibits from:
Musée du Louvre, Paris
The British Museum, London
Musei Capitolini, Rome
Musei Vaticani – Museo Gregoriano Etrusco
Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze, Florence
Museo Nazionale Etrusco de Villa Giulia, Rome
Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Cervereti
Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Vulci
Museo Nazionale Etrusco, Tarquinia
Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya, Barcelona, Empúries and Ullastret

• The centenary of the Palau de la Música Catalana
  9 February to 25 May 2008.

Officially opened on 9 February 1908, the Palau de la Música Catalana is one of the most striking concert halls in the world. It was built between 1905 and 1908 to a design by the architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner. To mark the occasion of the centenary of this Palau de la Música Catalana, CaixaForum will be paying homage to the institution in pictures and sound drawn from the Palau’s long history. That concert hall served as a venue for the most renowned figures and ensembles of the world’s musical culture, ranging from Pau Casals, Richard Strauss with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Yehudi Menuhin, Victoria de los Ángeles, Alfredo Kraus and Herbert von Karajan to the leading performers of present-day musical life such as Montserrat Caballé, Daniel Barenboim, Josep Carreras, Plácido Domingo, Ainhoa Arteta, etc. The exhibition presents, in a dynamic, contemporary manner, the testimonies of those who have been part of that universal spirit through their commitment to the promotion of music and culture.

• Hannah Collins
  22 May to 24 August 2008.

The work of Hannah Collins (London, 1956) is a reflection on the passage of time and on human presence. Her works are investigations that reveal an explicit social history, not far removed from news. Though interdisciplinary in nature, her work is based on photography (featuring works that are monumental in scale) and on experimental cinematography (with a film language that verges on the documentary and the staged scene). In this exhibition, curated by Mark Nash, Head of Department for Curating Contemporary Art at London’s Royal College of Art, a major work of hers will be shown for the first time: Parallel. At the CaixaForum centre in Barcelona, Paralel and Current History will be shown.

• Contemporary Art from China
  4 June to 7 September 2008.

An exhibition of Chinese contemporary art, curated by Gao Minglu, a lecturer and independent curator specialising in the latest artistic trends in his country. This selection is the counterpart of the exhibition Visions and expressions, that was on show at the Beijing Imperial City Art Museum from 28 June to 23 August 2007 and featured 16 works from the Fundació ”la Caixa” Contemporary-Art Collection by artists of the stature of Antoni Tàpies, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter and Miquel Barceló.

• Sublime Beauty. Renaissance treasures from the city of Prato
  20 June to 28 September 2008.

This exhibition brings together 55 pieces from the Museo Civico of Prato, a city located 17 kilometres north of Florence – a Museum that has been undergoing restoration since 1998 and scheduled to reopen in 2009. The works exhibited (paintings, sculptures, furniture and silver pieces), are drawn from a period running from 1300 to 1700, i.e. from the earliest beginnings of the Renaissance to its final stage. The spotlight in this selection is on the period known as the Early Renaissance, in the form of artistic work from the fifteenth century (the Quattrocento). That was a particularly significant time for the arts in Florence, just when two of its leading lights, Donatello and Filippo Lippi, moved to the city of Prato.

 Images

Caixa Forum - Barcelona	Caixa Forum - Barcelona	Grande Auditório do Centro Cultural de Belém Lisboa II - 2005 - 200 x 259 cm	Charles Chaplin, A Jitney Elopement (1915) | © Dels Arxius de Roy Export Company Establishment, cortesia de NBC Photographie, París
Sarcòfag de Larthia Seianti | Chiusi, necròpoli de Poggio Cantarello | Segle ii aC | Florència, Museo Archeologico Nazionale © album/akg	Expo Palau de la Música: Sala de concerts Palau de la Música | Foto: Pere Vivas - Triangle Postals

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