Barcelona: Domestic @ Espai Cultural Caja Madrid - Last call!

Some people – like myself – enjoy seeing pictures of people in their “private” environment. In their house. For my is a mixture of voyeur-ness and also a new line to imagine their lives and how they related to yours. For the last two months, the Espai Cultural Casa Madrid in Barcelona has open to the public “Domestic”, a photography and new media exhibition that means to give a new reading n the contemporary house – on what we call home (or family) and why we do it.
Situated just by Plaça Catalunya, it's a nice stroll in a quiet and shadowy place when you're tired of walking, And in the walls, all the pictures to people eating, sleeping, getting married, denouncing abuses or just posing for the photographer seem like small windows to other lives (attention to a specific series, “Through the window” of Giorgio Barrera”).
There are also four quite eye-catching video work about the capturing of such image: what kind of story each ones tells about their own photography, how do you live according to the country you are in and a interactive game of pre-conceived ideas: you must matched the videos of some houses with people (a butcher, a policeman, an opera singer...).
Other interesting thing are some small books scattered through the exhibition with special collections of pictures: the giving birth of a girl in her parents house, the wedding of a gay couple from San Francisco in Barcelona, the domestic pictures that you can do in the intimacy of your house for a year. There is also an online project where people can upload their own “Domestic” images. Take a peak here.
Maybe some of the walls are too much – with too many pictures to see – but overall you get the feeling at the end of the show that it is always worth to look a little bit further and try to understand what else is behind that quiet or silly neighbor of yours.
(The image in this post is the first very big picture of the exhibit called “False appearances” (2005) from Frédéric Nauczyciel)

Domestic (29.4.2010 - 27.6.2010)
Espai Cultural Caja Madrid
Plaça de Catalunya, 9. Barcelona
Free entrance to the exhibitions.
Opening hours – Monday through saturday, 10 to 21hrs. Sundays and holidays, 10 to 14 hrs.
Webpage

The Hague: A Room for Art @ Mauritshuis-Last Call!

Don't be fooled: the Mauritshuis is not a museum – it's a Royal Gallery designated with the best possible taste. As a Gallery – and a little bit as a museum – the curators program small exhibitions like this one “A Room for Art”, that will end next Monday (that is, the last day to visit in Sunday June 27th, 2010).
When I talk about small exhibitions I mean one or two small rooms with at the most three master works in the theme that they're talking about. In this case, it goes about the rooms that very rich collectors and sponsors of artists in the XVIIth century had to keep all the works they patronized. They could very well be rooms in their own houses or in the houses of the artists that used to work for them.
The exhibition is, as customary in Mauritshuis, small and enough. You have only seven works of art to carefully lay eyes in that idea of mega-painting , that many times was made as a concert: a lot of painters working in such portrait of the extraordinary collections of work sponsored by those who also where extraordinarily rich.
That's what I liked the most: the idea of a group of painting agreeing in painting in the same canvas, to portrait as many masterpieces as they could as a group, trying to portray that reality of richness hidden in such “Rooms for Art” in the old Antwerp.
(The image that illustrates this post is one of the paintings, made by W. van Haecht and entitled "Alexander the Great visiting the studio of Apelles".)

Mauritshuis-The Royal Picture Gallery
Korte Vijverberg 8, The Hague.
Adult entrance price: 12,00€ (2010)
Opening hours - visit web page, they change through the year. In summer they open everyday.