Exhibitions
Francesc Català-Roca reveals the visual soul of Barcelona in a never-before-seen exhibition at the National Archives
Lumínic recovers The Skin of Barcelona, a posthumous project by the master of Catalan photography that dialogues with the city from the fifties to the seventies.
The seventh edition of the Lumínic festival includes one of the most outstanding proposals in its program with the inauguration, this Thursday, June 18 at 6 p.m., of the exhibition Francesc Català-Roca. The skin of Barcelona at the National Archive of Catalonia, in Sant Cugat del Vallès. The exhibition, curated by Manuel Guerrero, rescues an unpublished and deeply personal project that the photographer left unfinished before his death in 1998.
The exhibition has its origins in the model of a photobook that Francesc Català-Roca had conceived from more than two hundred photographs of Barcelona. This set of images, mainly taken between the 1950s and 1970s, is presented as a visual construction far removed from simple urban documentation: the photographs establish a dialogue between themselves through rhythm, forms and aesthetic correspondences, offering an intimate and poetic portrait of the city.
The Skin of Barcelona thus becomes a synthesis of Català-Roca's view of his adopted city. The exhibition allows us to discover his unique ability to capture everyday life, urban spaces, heritage and anonymous gestures that make up Barcelona's collective memory. At the same time, it highlights his evolution from black and white to color, a change that accompanies the social and visual transformations of the city during the second half of the 20th century.
Considered one of the great names in contemporary Catalan photography, Francesc Català-Roca (Valls, 1922 – Barcelona, 1998) built a body of work marked by sensitivity, observation and an extraordinary capacity to transform everyday reality into his own artistic language. This exhibition offers the opportunity to rediscover one of his most singular and lesser-known mature works.
The exhibition is part of the Lumínic festival, which until July 12, 2026, turns Sant Cugat del Vallès into a large space for reflection on author photography. With twelve main exhibitions, as well as conferences, screenings, workshops and various activities, this year's event explores the poetics of the image and the multiple forms of expression of photographic language.
You may be
interested
...
