Money should not be an excuse. Barcelona is full of free museums and exhibitions that open the door to culture without us having to spend a euro. And we’re not just talking about weird, small museums (or even street): in the city there are large centers with high quality exhibitions that do not give everything for the simple effort of approaching them.
Museums of contemporary art, photography and audiovisual culture, theater, architecture and even jewelry. The cultural offer in Barcelona is great, and if it’s free, even better. So now you know, if your pocket is with cobwebs, but your head asks for culture, these are the great free exhibitions you can visit now in Barcelona.
La Virreina, Image Center. FERNAND DELIGNY, In Praise of Asylum
Deligny’ s life and work are inseparable from his “attempts” to allow the children and adolescents entrusted to him – delinquent, psychotic, and later autistic – to live according to their “ways of being” rather than according to the social rules of education. He conducted these experiences first within the institutions and then “outside”, where he was able to invent his own way of life and a common territory with total independence.
This exhibition, entitled In Praise of Asylum, is an opportunity to question this horizon, to stage the experimental forms invested in the attempt of Les Cévennes: deligny’s writing, inspired by the infinitive “stroke” of Janmari, the autistic child; the famous cartography of the children’s “wandering lines”, drawn by non-professional educators (workers, peasants, students) who lived 24 hours a day with the children, and the images – photography, cinema, painting – produced throughout this search for the “common human”.
📍 La Rambla, 99
Centre d’Arts Santa Mònica. “Cimarron Anti-futurism” (What would have happened if Europe had not existed?)
It is a collaborative exhibition that adopts the idea of artwork as a cure. A group of activist and community artists, individuals and collectives, previously selected, have been invited to be part of a collective creation process based on the reflection, from their experiences and different enunciative places, on a series of texts and contexts that announce with hope the disappearance of Europe and its world project based on the ego conquiro.
During the preparatory sessions for the Cimarron Anti-Futurism exhibition, a question arose: what would have happened if Europe had never existed? Here, Europe did not refer to a geopolitical territory, but to a civilizing idea that has historically shaped the set of relations of power and domination at the basis of the colonial project.
📍 La Rambla, 7
Casa Seat. “Human/AI Design Challenge”
CASA SEAT will exhibit the finalist posters of the Human/AI Design Challenge promoted by the Barcelona Design Week (BDW). These projects, which have been created with the help of artificial intelligence content generation algorithms, aim to be a reflection of students from design schools around the world on how to balance the best relationship between human creative thinking and artificial intelligence.
📍 Pg. de Gràcia, 109
Photographic Archive of Catalonia. “From pictorialism to modernity. Centenary of the Photographic Association of Catalonia”
The Photographic Archive of Barcelona and the Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya present the exhibition “From Pictorialism to Modernity. Centenary of the Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya”, which shows a selection of the Agrupació’s collections ranging from the pictorialist movement, expanded during the twenties and thirties, to the new aesthetic proposals that emerged in the renewal of the fifties, two key moments in the history of photography in Catalonia.
The Agrupació Fotogràfica de Catalunya has been constituted in photography ticket and cradle of new generations of photographers in the city of Barcelona and the Photographic Archive of Barcelona contributes to the celebration of its centenary with this exhibition.
📍 Plaça de Pons i Clerch, 2
La Capella. “Concèntric”
The exhibition Open Panoràmic puts in dialogue the work of the six finalist artists of the national artistic call organized by the Panoràmic Festival around image and video. This edition is coordinated by curator Federica Matelli, and the video works revolve around documentary, experimentation and visual essay.
The exhibition is also a collaboration between the Panoràmic Festival, the art center La Capella and the Escola Massana, thus testing a working model that connects aspects of training, production and dissemination of emerging art. This exhibition at the Escola Massana is part of Concèntric, a Program of La Capella that establishes relationships of complicity with related artistic spaces and projects.
📍 Carrer de l’Hospital, 56
MUHBA Oliva Artés
A former factory poblenou survives in the middle of a park and surrounded by tall office buildings, and invites us in (for free) to ask ourselves how a city evolves. It is the MUHBA Oliva Artés, a space that, according to its website, is “a laboratory and participatory museum about the history, legacy and heritage of the contemporary city”.
Currently in the MUHBA Oliva Artés space you can visit the permanent exhibition Interrogar Barcelona. From industrialization in the 21st century, an exhibition that examines the trajectory of Barcelona from the 18th century to the present day and approaches it from different angles such as labor, demographics, immigration, social conflicts, territory or industrial development.
It also hosts temporary exhibitions that can be viewed at consult on its website.
📍 C. de Espronceda, 142-146
MAE. Museum of Performing Arts of the Institut del Teatre
Yes, the Institut del Teatre albertga, in addition to the school, a theater museum with which to explore much of the history of the performing arts in Catalonia and you can visit for free, perhaps while you make time to enter a play at the Teatre LLiure or Mercat de Les Flors.
This is the Documentation Center and Museum of the Performing Arts, which has two spaces (La Sala and El Vestíbulo) where it shows both its own exhibitions and, on occasion, those of collaborating entities. The permanent exhibition is The Memory of the Ephemeral Arts at the Museum of the Performing Arts, which highlights the work of conservation, documentation and dissemination that the museum has been doing for almost one hundred years.
📍 Margarida Xirgu s/n, 08004 (Barcelona). Third floor
Palau Robert
The jewel of Passeig de Gracia is in very good shape, and this former mansion, which is, among many other things, an exhibition center, regularly hosts very high level exhibitions that are free of charge.
It is currently hosting two exhibitions in tribute to the writer Joan Fuster, as part of the centenary of his birth. . The first, “Joan Fuster in his time”, proposes a journey through his life and professional career, while the second, “Joan Fuster – Josep Pla: an infinite conversation”, illustrates the intense relationship that the author of Nosaltres, els valencians had with the Empordà writer Josep Pla.
Bagués-Masriera Museum
A small and unknown jewel in Las Ramblas. And never better said because it is a museum of modernist jewelry, hidden on the second floor of the Derby Hotel, where the Bgués jewelry store used to be.
If you are interested in modernist and Art Nouveau jewelry, this is the place for you. There are more than one hundred pieces of jewelry, objects, plates and booklets of original designs in the exhibition, which brings together pieces from the period between 1900 and 1925 of the artist Lluís Masriera.
📍Las Ramblas, 105
College of Architects
Surely you already know the mural of Picasso in Plaça Nova (the Cathedral Square) Well, in that building is the College of Architects of Catalonia and on the first floor there are always exhibitions related to architecture with free tickets. They also have a bookstore specializing in architecture.
📍 Plaça Nova, 5
The world’s smallest museum that lurks in the streets of Gracia
When we walk we look to the sky, to the ground, forward or to whoever accompanies us. We look at the store windows or the facades of buildings, but rarely stop to look at the walls, which usually hide few secrets and are nothing more than the transition between one door and another, the piece of stone born to hide things, not to show them.
But that changes in Gracia, the neighborhood which houses a museum, the smallest in the world, hidden in the walls of its streets. To find it, one can freely walk around the neighborhood, or, if in a hurry, consult the map of the site, which indicates where to look for it.
The exhibition rooms of the “Smallest Museum in the World” are not rooms or galleries, but holes in the wall just 10 cm wide and long. They are the old water faucets of the city, holes hidden behind small black metal doors that have been left empty, and that the artist Noemí Batllori began to fill, a few years ago, with her daughter Gala, with small works of art.
📍 Gràcia Neighborhood