Escaping to Barcelona

So I decided that we all need a break (me included) from posts about Cambridge, Kettles Yard and my dissertation. The winter has been bleak and the year ahead (my final year of university) looks to be relentless so I have been getting fidgety. In January I will be heading off to Barcelona for a few days and I can't help dreaming a little prematurely about what I will be getting up to.

A gingerbread house is the gate to Gaudi's park rising in to the Barcelona skyline!

In 2009 I had another brief fling with Barcelona, however my lasting impression was of the locked doors of the Picasso museum, on the final day of our trip we had succeeded in arriving on the day of its closure. With over 3800 of Picasso's work the museum offers a key Picasso collection connecting with the work exhibited in Paris and Madrid. The collection explores Picasso's early formative years, including the Las Meninas series, and Picasso's deep relationship with the city and culture of Barcelona. The website also tells me that it has a collection of his prints! By some felicitous accident I have booked my trip to coincide with the dregs of a brilliant temporary exhibition; Picasso looks at Degas. Take a look here; http://www.bcn.cat/museupicasso/en/exhibitions/current.html

Picasso The Dwarf, I had not considered it before but I can see Degas in the melted brushstrokes and the figure of the dancer. Picasso has proffered his own twist by dwarfing her elegance.

Internet searches have also helped me to discover The Antoni Tapies Foundation where there will be an exhibition of a Brazilian artist, Anna Maria Maiolino. Maiolino sought to reinvigorate Brazilian art by 'reconnecting life and art by echoing the social resurgence of the body and subjectivity' and this will be her first major European retrospective. Her work is in a range of media including; poetry, woodcuts, photography, film, performance, sculpture and drawing. I think it sounds absolutely amazing- prints and sculpture! Read more here; http://www.fundaciotapies.org/site/spip.php?rubrique995.

Other things I will be visiting will no doubt include La Sagrada Familia (which I will probably enjoy more now I am interested in architecture and sculpture), the Gaudi Park, the Museum of Contemporary art and possibly the Joan Miro Foundation. Although I can already see my time wearing thin. The whole city of Barcelona is a kind of Art installation marked as it is by the dancing and twisting forms of Gaudi and the winter beach lapping at its edge. It will be a blissful break. Mornings at galleries, afternoons at the beach, evenings drinking in the hostel? Sounds like a plan.