Museu de l'Art Prohibit Barcelona

The Museum of Art Prohibit is located in the Casa Garriga Nogués, a building declared an asset of cultural interest and located in the center of Barcelona 's Eixample. It is an architectural jewel of modernist inspiration from the early 20th century, the work of architect Enric Sagnier, which has more than 2,000 square meters distributed over two floors. Inside, a monumental staircase and rooms with original decorations and stained glass windows stand out.

A house with a lot of history

Enric Sagnier y Villavecchia (1858-1931) was one of the architects who worked the most for the upper bourgeoisie of Barcelona, although his name is not as well known as that of other modernist architects.

The banker Rupert Garriga-Nogués y Miranda commissioned Sagnier to build this house. And he lived with his family until the Civil War broke out. Later it was occupied by the Sagrados Corazones de Jesús y de María religious school and, between 1983 and 2004, it was the headquarters of the Grup Enciclopèdia Catalana.

This is not the first time that the ground floor and main floor of Casa Garriga Nogués have been converted into an exhibition space. From 2008 to 2015, the Godia Foundation exhibited its permanent collection. It was then the location chosen by the Mapfre Foundation in Barcelona, and is currently the Museo de l'Art Prohibit.

the collection

The collection of the Museo de l'Art Prohibit brings together more than 200 works that have been censored, banned or denounced for political, social or religious reasons.

Among the pieces that are part of the collection are paintings, sculptures, engravings, photographs, installations and audiovisual works that form a wide sample of cases that have often transcended the media and social networks, created largely during the second half of the 20th century and during the 21st century.

The collection includes works by internationally renowned artists, such as Ai Weiwei, Robert Mapplethorpe and Tania Bruguera. It also has iconic pieces from the history of contemporary art, such as León Ferrari's The Western and Christian Civilization or Andrés Serrano's Piss Christ, long associated with bitter debates.

Other names such as Pablo Picasso, Francisco de Goya and Gustav Klimt were also not exempt from censorship and are part of that unique collection. All of this, the numerous works that make up the collection trace a temporal arc that goes from the period of the Enlightenment to the neoliberal societies of our present, from the 18th century to the 21st century.