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La Capella is the space that the Culture Institute of Barcelona dedicates to emerging artistic creation. In recent years, its activity has centred on organising exhibitions aimed at acquainting the public with the most innovative approaches being taken by the city’s artists. It has also turned its attention to promoting exchange projects that disseminate approaches coming from other cities and cultural zones of the world, thereby bringing artists linked with Barcelona into contact with other contexts. The exhibitions and activities produced at La Capella aim to show the great variety of approaches taken by today’s artists. In recent years, it has presented very different types of activities in an attempt to provide a wide-ranging overview of creativity in Barcelona. These activities, around which La Capella’s programming is articulated, opt for approaches in which public participation is fundamental, including debate-stimulating themes as well as proposals and projects with a local focus. The BCN Producció project should become the main vehicle for determining La Capella’s programming in order to boost the participation of artists and professionals in the sector through public open calls selected by independent juries. La Capella de l’Antic Hospital is located in the Raval neighbourhood in the historic city centre of Barcelona, inside the architectural complex of the Hospital de la Santa Creu and Casa de la Convalescència. The building is catalogued as a historical and artistic monument of national interest. BCN and the new languages of culture Contemporary art represents a strategic sector in the cultural picture of Barcelona and its dissemination, now with the even greater access to new public spaces, is complemented by strengthening the roles played by creators in today's social scene. In this sense the city has for some time centred its attention on artistic vanguards. The visual arts are in evidence all over the city, in open-air sculptures, in the activities of the numerous art galleries -gathered together in Consell de Cent Street, the Born district or, more recently, in some of the streets of the Cuitat Vella, the Old Town- as well as in exhibitions organized by cultural centres and institutions. These include the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art MACBA, the CCCB; as well as specialized institutions such as the Museu Picasso, Fundació Miró, Fundació Tàpies which, along with the work of the artists whose name they bear also disseminate the art of their contemporaries, allowing us an insight into the historical and artistic context of the period. Barcelona is also a model of permanent research into the contemporary art of the new languages, of the new instruments of expression using new technologies, video and the Internet. The city counts on a stable public interested in all such variants of contemporary art and nurtures spaces where it can be expressed: it acts as host and welcomes artists from abroad with proposals like Hangar; it opens doors, with activities like the Open Workshops (in Poble Nou and the Raval districts), demonstrating the existence of a network of artistic creation and dissemination; it organizes events connected with contemporary art is worthy of mention that represent spaces of interchange of contemporary art in the city. Amongst all of this activity, the contribution made by La Capella to the cultural fabric of the city must not be overlooked: one municipal institutions (La Capella with its Sala Gran and R.punt exhibition halls) stand out as a platform for the dissemination of contemporary art and the projection of new artists. History of La Capella The activities organised by La Virreina Exposicions are held in rooms
in two historic buildings in Barcelona: the Palau de la Virreina and
La Capella in the Antic Hospital de la Santa Creu. |
La Capella
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